Sebastian Gonzalez

RHCE of the Year, Latin America, 2009

"I have obtained the confidence and strength needed to upgrade our 2000+ Red Hat servers with almost no issues, outages or disruptions."

Infrastructure specialist

Thanks to the instruction and experience gained during the course of RHCE®, I have obtained the confidence and strength needed to carry on an ambitious project aimed to upgrade all our 2000+ Red Hat® servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux® 5.3; with almost no issues, outages or disruptions. These systems are offering very critical services for our clients, and they are based on a great variety of hardware, which made this challenge a lot more interesting. In this process I collaborated intensively on the improvement of our build-up environments (using RedHat's Kickstart services), and providing automated solutions for the deployment of several applications required by our customers; like Postfix, Apache, NFS and virtualized environments, enhancing and simplyfing our new-builds processes.

As a result of the outstanding performance of RHEL 5 and the skills obtained as RHCE, our clients have decided to migrate several services (including high-end databases) that were running on closed-source operating systems; which were the source of at least 85% of unexpected incidents and after-hour engagements of the on-calls. Therefore, we did not only increase results for our clients, also today my colleagues and I can have more free time after work and can sleep soundly.