Lenny Tropiano

Current

• Sr. Systems/Network Architect at HomeAway
• Owner at VoIPing, LLC

Past

• Director, Infrastructure (Operations) at Coremetrics, Inc.
• Sr. Network Engineer/Architect at Trillion Partners, Inc.
• Director, Advanced Technology and Networking at Rocksteady

• Sr. Network Manager at Forgent Networks
• Sr. Network Engineer at VTEL
• Independent Consulting Work at ICUS Software Systems (Self-employed)
• Senior Operating Systems Specialist at Applied Research Laboratories, University of Texas at Austin
• Staff Software Engineer at IBM
• Operation Support Specialist -- Software Analyst (OSS-SA) at IBM

see less...

6 more...

Education

• Hofstra University
• Rochester Institute of Technology

Recommended

25 people have recommended Lenny

Connections

500+ connections

Industry

Information Technology and Services

Websites

• HomeAway Website
• VoIPing, LLC

Lenny Tropiano’s Summary

Seasoned key contributor for IT/Operations/Infrastructure teams with expertise in provisioning, networking, systems, security and global data center infrastructure. Managing the budgets, forecasting and planning lifecycle through implementation and data center deployment.

Excellent negotiation skills with vendor relationships offering the ability to reduce costs across the board for all operating and capital expenditures.

Highly skilled in managing/designing and implementing large WAN/LAN networks for both corporate and production data center operations.

Over 25 years of Unix experience on many platforms.

Lenny Tropiano’s Specialties:

Cisco ASA/PIX Firewalls, Netscaler, Citrix, F5 BigIP GTM (DNS), Cisco WAN/LAN/Voice infrastructure, Cisco Call Manager (VoIP/IP Telephony), QoS, BGP, MPLS, SIP, Asterisk PBX, IP Video, MCU, Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris

Lenny Tropiano’s Experience

• Sr. Systems/Network Architect

  HomeAway

  (Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Internet industry)

  March 2008 — Present (1 year 9 months)

  Key member of the Infrastructure Architecture team at HomeAway, Inc. Responsible for core decisions, implementation and design for HomeAway's vacation rentals offer for its major brands which include HomeAway, CyberRentals, GreatRentals, VRBO, A1Vacations, Fewo-Direkt, Holiday-Rentals, Owners Direct, TripHomes, VacationRentals, EscapeHomes, and many others. Contributions include all data centers, networking and systems related activities. www.homeaway.com

• Owner

  VoIPing, LLC

  (Partnership; 1-10 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  December 2001 — Present (8 years )

  http://www.voiping.com
  
  Local business owner of a Central Texas privately owned and operated partnership specializing in IT Consulting and Services, with a strong emphasis on converged networks, Unix operating systems and Voice over IP (IP Telephony). Consulting jobs with local area companies, everything from IT Augmentation to Server Deployment/Development. Presentation on IP Telephony given to local user group. Host customer facing websites on a Dual Athlon/SATA-RAID FreeBSD-based server collocated at Inflow in a shared rack with other Austin system/network administrators. Major projects included IT augmentation for First American Flood Data Services Oracle/Solaris deployment (10 month project); backup plan and collocation facility move from Exodus to Inflow for Digital Motorworks; Web/DNS Services, ADS/Exchange 2000 and Fileserver rollout for Richard P. Slaughter & Associates and Asterisk VoIP PBX Deployment for Velocity Electronics, Inc.

• Director, Infrastructure (Operations)

  Coremetrics, Inc.

  (Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  March 2006 — March 2008 (2 years 1 month)

  Key contributor in Operations team responsible for provisioning, networking, systems, security and global data center infrastructure. Managing the budgets, forecasting and planning lifecycle through implementation and deployment for four domestic and one international data centers. Manage team responsible for day-to-day network administration. Key milestones for 2007 (Q1) -- RFP for next data center hosting, design, procurement, implementation and complete operations in 3 months and under budget. Significant reduction in overall costs in storage, systems, software and maintenance. Key milestones 2006 -- Expanding capacity/footprint for our main Austin data center. Designed and implemented new IT infrastructure/network, MPLS based voice, video and (private IP and public IP) data network keeping costs well below budget. Implemented QoS throughout the LAN and WAN (voice, video and data), separating the operations and IT internal networks for security compliance. Promoted in 2007.

• Sr. Network Engineer/Architect

  Trillion Partners, Inc.

  (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  January 2005 — March 2006 (1 year 3 months)

  Mentor and senior technical advisor/expert on LAN, WAN and voice over IP (VoIP). Responsible corporate IS/IT infrastructure. Established procurement relationship to reduce corporate and capital for all projects by over 45% (multi-million dollar projects). Migrated corporate services to 2003 ADS, Clustered Exchange 2003 with an EMC SAN. Implemented backup strategy. Established virtual production services using VMWare ESX server, reducing cost and time to implementation. Involved in deployment and implementation of Trillion’s largest customer to date, Region VIII/NTERN (42 school districts (Northeast Texas) wide area network, over 100 schools) utilizing latest WWAN high-speed technology, gigabit wide-area fiber backbone, multiple redundant PIX firewalls, OSPF, T3 Internet POPs, DNS, 8e6 filtering, Proofpoint spam filtering, email and Allot packet shaper. Architected, Implemented and solely responsible for Nimsoft (Nimbus) NMS system for entire customer base network operations center.

• Director, Advanced Technology and Networking

  Rocksteady

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)

  September 2003 — December 2004 (1 year 4 months)

  Core member of the Engineering Technical Staff reporting to CTO. Responsible for highlevel research and product direction of RocksteadyNSA™. Manage all IT services (including internal and external facing systems collocated at Inflow). Implemented and maintain all tools (Nagios, Bugzilla, Subversion, Wiki, Samba, Subversion/build, Veritas using Spectralogic) on Linux Core servers with RAID SATA disks. Manage Cisco and Rocksteady-built infrastructure and IPSEC/PPTP tunnels to home/remote users. Developed and implemented a plan to move the entire company from TDM to SIP-based Asterisk (open source) PBX with failover and redundancy, integrated voicemail/e-mail, ACD queues, remote voice users with VPN tunnels. Paper/talk on the success of the Rocksteady Asterisk deployment at the 1st annual Astricon Conference (www.astricon.net) in September 2004. Responsible for all the booth infrastructure, setup, planning and demonstrations at the NCTA Conference (May 2004).

• Sr. Network Manager

  Forgent Networks

  (Public Company; 501-1000 employees; FORG; Telecommunications industry)

  January 1999 — November 2001 (2 years 11 months)

  VTEL transformed to Forgent during my tenure as Core Member Technology team, responsible for operation, maintenance, research, design, procurement and deployment of the global network corporate infrastructure. Manage all critical Cisco network switches, routers, wireless and VoIP/RAS gateways. Video and voice over IP network implementing QoS on LAN/WAN along with a multi-gigabit ethernet backbone to core switches and servers. Deployed VoIP (H.323,SIP,MGCP) using Cisco AVVID technologies, including Unified Messaging and backbone WAN PBX trunk traffic over VoIP. Designed and implemented globally, user VPN services (RSA/SecurID), for direct cost-reduction and increased remote user flexibility. VPN tunnels in Beijing and smaller sales locations. Manage DMZ, corporate firewalls and engineering Internet resources. Sun Oracle/ERP, DHCP/DNS, firewall and fileservers; Exchange (e-mail) and Web servers. Recommended/implemented cutover to new corporate data service provider; saving company 50%.

• Sr. Network Engineer

  VTEL

  (Public Company; 501-1000 employees; VTEL; Telecommunications industry)

  April 1997 — January 1999 (1 year 10 months)

  Developed automated testing procedures while working closing with Engineering staff for the networking internals of the H.323 IP-based videoconferencing component of the VTEL product. Developed test plans, procedures, and test cases. Designed, procured and implemented a high-speed real-world internal infrastructure for testing the product on with interconnectivity with the VTEL corporate infrastructure and core operations. This included switched/shared 10/100Mbps ethernet, ATM and Frame Relay. Lead team effort for Worldwide Industry Interoperability event. Debugged and closely worked with staff for all networking issues, including circuit switched networks (ISDN BRI/PRI, T1, Switched 56) and packet switched networks (Ethernet
  and ATM). Procured 3rd party competitive products for Interoperability testing PictureTel, VCON, and Intel). ``Contributor of the Quarter,'' 3rd Quarter 1997 for team participation in the SuperOp/Interoperability Event.

• Independent Consulting Work

  ICUS Software Systems (Self-employed)

  (Self-Employed; 1-10 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  January 1988 — November 1998 (10 years 11 months)

  Co-authored an article for Byte Magazine, entitled, "How to Implement ISDN", published April 1995. Technical Editor for published book, ISDN Networking Essentials. Involved in the deployment of ISDN connectivity services for an Austin Internet service provider, which included installation, configuration, security, and testing of Ascend ISDN TCP/IP routers and other ISDN PC-based hardware options. ISDN home networking seminar given to CACTUS, a local UNIX users group. Design and development of World Wide Web pages. Co-authored the UNIX-pc Hard Disk Upgrade for the AT&T 3B1 UNIX workstation.

• Senior Operating Systems Specialist

  Applied Research Laboratories, University of Texas at Austin

  (Government Agency; 501-1000 employees; Government Administration industry)

  December 1994 — March 1997 (2 years 4 months)

  Systems and Network Administration for Synthetic Theater of War (STOW), Configuration Management Technology Organization (CMTO), and Battle Force Tactical Trainer (BFTT) projects. Maintain a medium-sized heterogeneous network of UNIX systems, including Sun Microsystems (Solaris), Silicon Graphics (IRIX), Intel PC (Solaris, FreeBSD, and Linux), Convex (ConvexOS) and Hewlett Packard (HPUX). Maintain a switched TCP/IP ethernet (10/100Mbps) network. Designed, configured, installed and maintain a thirty-two host ATM OC-3 (155Mbps) to the desktop LAN intranet used for distributed interactive simulation and multimedia (including voice and video traffic). Designed a multimedia center with an ATM network for distribution of video teleconferencing, training and executive briefings throughout the laboratory. Involved in the deployment and demonstration of an OC-192 (10Gbps) SONET ATM metropolitan area network (SBC/TRI and Time Warner MAN). DoD Security clearance.

• Staff Software Engineer

  IBM

  (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; IBM; Computer Software industry)

  November 1992 — December 1994 (2 years 2 months)

  Kernel Developer on AIX LVM (Logical Volume Manager). Co-implemented software striping (RAID-0) under AIX Version 4. Commands and library component owner for AIX LVM, responsible for problem tracking, resolution and assignment of code defects and features to the LVM group. Responsible for code involved in functional verification and regression testing of LVM component for multiprocessor and software striping changes to LVM on AIX Version 4. Instructor for IBM Japan (Kawasaki, Japan) for AIX Problem Determination Class, November 1994.
  
  Patent: Co-authored a mechanism for ``Incremental Backups,'' using physical partitions on disks, accepted for a patent. (accepted July 1997 / submitted February 1995)

• Operation Support Specialist -- Software Analyst (OSS-SA)

  IBM

  (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; IBM; Computer Software industry)

  November 1990 — November 1992 (2 years 1 month)

  Responsible for analyzing and debugging customer problems in support of the AIX Version 3 Kernel, device drivers/extensions, security, system services and related base operating system routines. Involved as team leader in management duties, process implementation and development of the automatic scheduling system for vacation, holiday and temporary assignment work-load balancing. Other responsibilities include maintaining and administering a local NIS distributed computing environment, training employees in AIX Kernel Internals and system dump analysis and being the subject matter expert for HACMP/6000.
  
  ``Outstanding Quality Service Award,'' August 1991 from the Austin AIX Service Center.

Lenny Tropiano’s Education

• Hofstra University

  BS/CS , Computer Science , January 1986 — May 1988

• Rochester Institute of Technology

  Computer Science December 1983 — November 1985

Additional Information

Lenny Tropiano’s Websites:

• HomeAway Website
• VoIPing, LLC

Lenny Tropiano’s Interests:

New Technology, Networking, Unix/Linux/FreeBSD, Digital Photography, VoIP, Open Source, Traveling (Cruises), Open Source Software, Asterisk

Lenny Tropiano’s Groups:

Capital Area Central Texas UNIX Society (CACTUS), Austin Sun Users Group (ASUG), Austin Asterisk Users Group

•    Online Marketing, Web Analytics, and E-commerce Group -- WebAnalysts.Info
•    Austin High-Tech
•    Telecom Professionals
•    The Enterprise Architecture Network
•    NANOG - The North American Network Operators' Group
•    Afcom
•    VMware Virtualization & Cloud Computing Group
•    Networkers Club for all Cisco networkers (http://www.hightecher.com)
•    Web Analytics Professionals (+5000 web analytics members) Join now!
•    IBMers
•    The Asterisk Group
•    Virtualization in Austin Users Group
•    Alumni of Hofstra University
•    Nagios Users
•    Green Computing & Data Center Network
•    Austin Sun Users Group
•    OWASP - Austin Chapter
•    VTEL Alumni

Lenny Tropiano’s Honors:

Patent (5649158): Co-authored a mechanism for ``Incremental Backups,'' using physical partitions on disks, accepted for a patent. (accepted July 1997 / submitted February 1995)

Lenny Tropiano’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch