About Me

Enterprise Architect at the City of Celina. Formerly Systems Architect for the City of Plano, I was instrumental in the acquisition and implementation of MFA, Hyper Convergence, Backup and DR, and numerous other NextGen technology modernization efforts throughout Plano. My role at Celina is to identify, design, and implement innovative technology to support Texas’ fastest growing city. From public safety to water utilities, parks and recreation to public Wi-Fi, Celina is building Life Connected for the 21st century. In my time outside the office, I volunteers with ITDRC, a non-profit team of volunteer technology professionals - Connecting Communities in Crisis.

My Blog

Work

City of Celina

Enterprise Architect • January 2022 - Present

Celina, a former farming town located just north of Frisco. Known as the fastest growing City in North Texas. Celina’s current pollution estimated at 37,000 and is expected to encompass 380,000 residents and 78 square miles.

City of Plano

Systems Architect | Systems Engineer • January 2019 - January 2022

The City of Plano is the home to 5 Fortune 1000 companies and over 10,000 other businesses. Our Technology Services team supports more than 280,000 residents, and 3000+ employees.

My role at the City is to establish technical design and implementation of all critical infrastructure that supports city operations. Duties include forging relationships with business partners, providing guidance to technical staff on configuration and design principals, prioritization of IT initiatives, providing recommendations for business process redesign, and directional guidance for budgeting and forecasting. Developing cost models across diverse on-premise and private cloud infrastructures, factoring full TCO and operational cost accounting. Evaluating current infrastructure, assessing needs, performing platform sizing, vendor proposal and technology solution evaluations, technical design and implementation.

Responsibilities include support for multiple Nutanix Hyper-Converged compute and storage clusters, Nutanix Files, VMware, Nutanix Acropolis (AHV), Cloud Data Management and Protection (Rubrik CDM), Okta Identity and Access Management, Active Directory, Office 365, Technology Scaling, Highly Fault Tolerant technical designs, and numerous other enterprise applications and infrastructure services that support the City’s 24/7 operation.

Texas 24

President • July 2017 - Present

Texas 24 designs, operates, and manages infrastructure strategies with the best in breed technologies to help organizations throughout Texas. Our expertise in enterprise computing platforms helps business develop an IT strategy that reduces cost and complexity, while enabling higher service levels and data availability to customers. From virtualization and cloud strategy, to solution specification, system operations, and data services contracting.

My responsibilities include day to day operations of Texas 24, coordination with customers, manufactures, and suppliers. I work with business executives to establish a technology baseline and to generate goals for the use of technology within their organization. Once the goals are established, a plan is created and the execution begins.

City of Plano

Senior Systems Administrator • July 2015 - August 2017

The City of Plano is the 4th largest municipality in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. Plano's Technology Services team supports more than 270,000 residents, and 3000+ employees.

My role at the City is to evaluate, plan, and work on the technical design and implementation of mission critical enterprise systems. Those responsibilities include evaluating current infrastructure, assessing needs, platform sizing, vendor proposal and technology solution evaluations, technical design and development of implementation plans.

In addition, my responsibilities include support for several VMware/Nutanix clusters, Active Directory, Group Policy, and numerous other enterprise applications and infrastructure services that support critical City services 24/7.

Oregon Ice Cream

IT Director• July 2006 - April 2015

Oregon Ice Cream is the leading privately owned ice cream manufacture of conventional and organic products with approximately $60M in worldwide sales.

My responsibilities included designing, managing and maintaining a geographically diverse network. I supervised application development, IT support staff, physical security, subcontractors, and consultants. I have project management experience in property acquisition, construction, buildout and relocation. Completed all telecommunications and data contract negotiations with multiple carriers to establish fully redundant network backbone. Established corporate acceptable electronic use policies, physical security and property policies. Led a team in a successful implementation of Microsoft Dynamics NAV. 

  • • Increased IT Equipment lifecycle 50% by introducing a full thin-client environment. 
  • • Reduced telecommunications expenses 63% by consolidating data and voice networks, and by utilizing SIP trunking. 
  • • Increased network and system availability by implementing OSPF, EIGRP, BGP and HSRP protocols on private and public facing networks. Fully redundant high bandwidth paths on each network leg.
  • • Implemented a variety of email platforms in-house and externally including Kerio Mail Server, Exchange, Office 365 and Google Apps.
  • • Implemented Hybrid-Cloud network operations utilizing Amazon Web Services, Office 365 and Gmail.
  • • Managed centralized storage (NFS and iSCSI) on NetApp and Dell Powervault devices.
  • • Virtualized Server environment with XenServer, Applications and Desktops with XenDesktop and XenApp.
  • • Designed and engineered datacenter for backup power via 80kW backup generator, automatic transfer switch, redundant Eaton UPS’, panel and monitored pdu configuration.
  • • Supervised, trained and hired a private security team of 4 armed guards for securing physical property and employees.

Certifications

MCSA: Windows Server 2016

November 2019

Okta Certified Administrator

November 2019

ACE-A - Arista Certified Engineering Associate

June 2018

VCP6-DCV - VMware Certified Professional 6 – Data Center Virtualization

February 2017

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

May 2017

References

  • Alden is a exceptional talent that exhibits both right and left brain abilities. He is highly analytical and a great problem solver, while, being personable and a true team player. What I respect about Alden is his ability to learn, understand, and bridge complex technical acumen with thorough understanding of the business needs. He is a instrumental part of the team who has consistently worked to decreased cost, increased productivity, and design and implement solutions that are scalable, reliable, and relevant. I see Alden's career path scalable, with his success directly linked to his desire to continue learning and being innovative, while understanding his customers needs. Alden is a rock star and we are proud and blessed to have a talent like him on our team.

    Chris Chaincone - Chief Information Officer at City of Plano

  • Alden is fantastic to work with, and has exceptional expertise in systems, networks, virtualization, cloud computing, customer service, research, troubleshooting, security, information sharing and documentation. He was well respected in our department and everyone enjoyed working with him. Loyal, insightful and independent. An energetic and broad-minded IT professional - that's him! As well as a very detail oriented team player. The success achieved in his work required extensive knowledge and dedication with the ability to learn and develop new repeatable processes on the fly. I enjoyed working with him on the several projects we took on. Though we only got to work together for about a year before he moved on to start his new company, we accomplished a lot as we worked to rebuild our entire IT infrastructure from the ground up. The largest project we worked on together was the migration of a small Hyper-V virtual environment of around 100 VMs and several hundred other disparate physical servers and storage solutions to a new hyperconverged Nutanix platform to centralize and simplify administration while simultaneously creating redundancy with a disaster recovery site for the City of Plano. His hard work and dedication to the success of this project was instrumental in producing a reliable platform to run a plethora of business applications needed to support various City operations as well as critical emergency services like Police, Fire and the 911 call center. Unlike working for a private company that generally only supports a narrow scope of systems for their customer base, a City government is essentially a collection of several dozens of business units of which all have varying degrees of technological needs and requirements which tends to create a very complex IT environment to maintain. In this environment, Alden shined with his ability to quickly rise to the occasion for any task he was assigned or took on. I would recommend Alden and his expertise for any project, big or small, and have confidence that he will deliver the desired results as efficiently as humanly possible, exceeding expectations. I consider him a close friend now and we frequently have discussions about emerging technologies and creative solutions and concepts to a wide variety of IT related problems.

    Chris Edwards - Enterprise Architect at City of Plano

  • Alden has been a great Senior IT manager who provides great direction in relation to the Company's IT infrastructure, network, equipment, information security, applications and user support. He is a through planner who can see the future needs of the organization and plan, communicate and execute the projects in a professional and timely manner. He continues to stay abreast of this fast changing part of our business. I would recommend his skills to anyone!

    Tom Gleason - President of Oregon Ice Cream

  • I worked with Alden on Julie's & Alden's websites, so I had the opportunity to experience his skills as a manager as well as his work with the technical side. He's one of those rare people that combines both sides of the equation: he's wise, sharp, understands the big picture, is fun to work with and reads people well. I'm happy to know him.

    Dru Martin - Creative Director, Brand Strategist, Designer at Moto Interactive

  • I have know Alden for many years now and he was a customer for some of those years. I have found Alden to be a very responsible and thorough person. He was always professional and knowledgeable in the projects that we worked on together. I would recommend Alden to anyone looking for a great catch in all ways.

    Bonnie Ramirez - Senior Account Manager at Zayo Group

Get In Touch.

Thank you for reviewing my resume and profile, please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have. I'd love the opportunity to get to know you.

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