Walter Smith is a twenty-four year Information Technology professional working in the area of planning, developing, deploying and the support of automation systems. Mr. Smith has served as a chief technology provider to business and industry in the Southeast. Prior to joining Stalwart, he utilized his extensive experience in architecting, strategizing, selling, implementing and supporting technology related project, predominately for law firms. Mr. Smith is a team leader whose abilities include managing multiple client engagements and project teams with extended project implementation cycles.
Mr. Smith’s most recent engagements have revolved around virtualization and storage initiatives at some of the largest law firms in the Carolinas. Recently completed projects focused on:
Virtualization
Assessed, architected and implemented VMware virtualization solutions to improve the efficiency and availability of IT resources and applications. Performed capacity analysis assessments to justify initiatives relative to TCO and Reduced physical server counts by performing consolidations and physical to virtual migrations. Implemented VMware features that resulted in reductions of server counts relative to test and development, resulting in significant software and hardware cost reductions and staff productivity increases.
Storage
Assessed and performed capacity analysis to determine strategic requirements for shared storage technologies in order to reduce costs and complexity. Implemented solutions to customers based on Fiber Channel and iSCSI (1GB & 10GB) technologies to realize performance improvements, cost reductions and to address availability and DR/BC concerns. Led implementation projects relative to both local and remote replication of strategic data in order to meet RPO and RTO SLA’s and objectives.
Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity
Perform proof of concept and implementations of remote replication products (array and host based) to facilitate customers DR/BC plans. Performed failover and failback testing in support of customer initiatives. Consulted with customers in determining priorities and SLA’s for mission-critical IT assets.
Backup
Analyzed and implemented changes to customers backup and retention strategy to reduce or eliminate tape as the primary backup and archival media. These initiatives and projects served to reduce customer risk, improve customers’ SLA’s, reduce backup windows and improve recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO/RPO).
Refresh
Performed design, project management and implementation of full systems refreshes including servers, storage, network infrastructure, desktops and other peripherals.
Upgrades & Migrations
Designed and implemented multi and cross dimensional upgrades relative to Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL. Migrated applications and data on hundreds of production systems with little user impact. Performed migrations from Lotus Notes and Novell Groupwise to Microsoft Exchange while maintaining system interoperability between the new and legacy systems. Performed upgrades and migrations on numerous other line of business applications (Blackberry Enterprise Server, Citrix and various accounting systems, to name but a few).
Computer Forensics
Mr. Smith’s thorough understanding of how Windows stores data on hard disks allows him to perform investigative/forensic analyses related to computer systems in an effort to identify, locate and recover maliciously deleted data and/or files. He has been engaged in support of litigation matters for private clients as well as local and federal courts.