Pascal Charest

Current

• Free software consultant at Les Laboratoires Phoenix

Past

• CloudMaster at Praized Media
• Consultant Logiciel Libre at Savoir-faire Linux
• Secrétaire/Trésorier at Ile Sans Fil

• Technical Lead at HAL Project
• Information systems consultant at Groupe Conseil Phoenix Inc.

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Recommended

2 people have recommended Pascal

Connections

120 connections

Industry

Information Technology and Services

Websites

• My Blog
• Flickr's stream
• CV & Presentation on my blog

Pascal Charest’s Summary

As a free software consultant, I work with wide arrays of technologies and infrastructures. My main skill include the design and deployment of scalable system, network infrastructures management and technical documentation.

In the last 2 years, I've been asked to lead and manage network deployment using computing cloud infrastructure such as Amazon AWS {EC2, S3, EBS}, 3Tera, GoGrid. I have also been contributing articles to technical publication in Europe and north america.

My expertise include deep knowledge of open source & free softwares such as :
- multi-master MySQL replication
- virtualisation (xen, openbox, vmware)
- web servers (apache, nginx, lighttpd, mongrel)
- SAN tech. (AoE, iSCSI)
- filesystem (LVM, xfs, reiserfs, lustre, glusterfs)
- management (capistrano, puppet, cfengine)
- surveillance (nagios, zabbix, cacti)
- openldap directory services

I have also been tasked with configuring and maintaining closed source softwares. While this is not my main area of expertise, I still have couple years of experience using:
- Microsoft Windows 2000/2003 server
- Solaris 8, 9 & 10 (containers & zfs)
- IIS 5 & 6

While I am implicated with the open source community (I have submitted patches for a few projects), my main interaction is with privates organizations through les Laboratoires Phoenix.

I currently hold the following certifications:
LPI-1 GNU/Linux system administrator
Zimbra single-node deployement architect
Zimbra multi-node deployement architect
Zimbra pre-sale consultant
Zabbix Certified Specialist

Pascal Charest’s Specialties:

Cloud computing, high {availability/performance/scalable} infrastructure. Network integration following mergers & acquisitions.

Pascal Charest’s Experience

• Free software consultant

  Les Laboratoires Phoenix

  (Privately Held; Information Technology and Services industry)

  January 2008 — Present (1 year 7 months)

  Les Laboratoires Phoenix is a consultancy firm offering services in Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec. Working with cutting-edge technologies, we help our clients lower the total ownership cost of information infrastructure through free software and open source.
  Our expertise also extend to corporate merger, network integration and training.
  
  Countless softwares are available in the open source domain therefore Les Laboratoires Phoenix selected a couple of them as central to the services we offer.
  
  We have consultants available for virtualization (xen, vmware), data management (AoE, iSCSI, GlusterFS, Lustre, DRBD), server administration (puppet, cfengine, capistrano) and monitoring (zabbix, ossec).
  
  We are also present in the open source community by submitting patches, writing articles and/or books, and offering training sessions.

• CloudMaster

  Praized Media

  (Privately Held; Internet industry)

  March 2008 — January 2009 (11 months)

  Design, deployment and maintenance of an highly, dynamically, scalable infrastructure over Amazon AWS in the context of providing services for a hyper-local web search application.
  
  Interaction with Amazon 'AWS' services (EC2, EBS, S3, ...) and other cloud providers to provide high degree of fault tolerance to the network/application stack.
  
  The 'cloudmaster' role is also to fine tune the current system stack (GNU/Linux, nginx, Apache, MySQL, mongrel, memcached, Sphinx, GlusterFS, ... and much more)

• Consultant Logiciel Libre

  Savoir-faire Linux

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  February 2007 — February 2008 (1 year 1 month)

  Savoir-faire Linux is an information technology firm based in Montreal with offices in Quebec and Ottawa.
  
  As one of the opensource consultant of Savoir-faire Linux, I work with architects to deliver custom solution to customer. I'm also a member of the GNU/Linux sysadmin team where I work with technology ranging from Cisco switch/router to load balanced web server (apache, lighttpd...). I also work with high-availability solution (DRBD, HB, LoadBalancer) for corporate environment (XEN virtualisation, SQL database, web server, thin clients ... ).

• Secrétaire/Trésorier

  Ile Sans Fil

  (Non-Profit; 11-50 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  May 2006 — March 2007 (11 months)

  As a member of the board of Directors of an organisation without full time staff, the secretary-treasurer is the number two after the president and reponsible for interaction with agents about the administration of the corporation.

• Technical Lead

  HAL Project

  (Telecommunications industry)

  March 2006 — March 2007 (1 year 1 month)

  The HAL Project (hub des artistes locaux) is a network of dynamic, embedded, media devices created to help the broadcast of locative media.
  
  As technical lead of the project, I was in charge of in-house development of a custom OpenSLUG operating system for the NSLU2 (Intel IXP420, xscale arm core) embedded device. The system was based on Apple's ZeroConf system (bonjour/rendez-vous) and a multi-threading daap streaming media server.
  
  I've lead the project from prototype to the deployment of 12 fully networked node.

• Information systems consultant

  Groupe Conseil Phoenix Inc.

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  February 2003 — February 2007 (4 years 1 month)

  As the information system consultant of the Groupe Conseil Phoenix, my responsibility was to research integration path and apply computer standards to different type of information network. I lead compliance testing and information sessions about PCI, ISO-17799 and SOX.
  
  The job also involved system administration (mainly free software [GNU/Linux] and Unix] in high-availability production environment. I was the principal consultant for web related technology (advanced LAMP stack; MySQL replication, Apache, nginx, PHP) and storage (nfs, aoe, samba)...
  
  Some custom development (C++, perl, PHP) was also required.

Additional Information

Pascal Charest’s Websites:

• My Blog
• Flickr's stream
• CV & Presentation on my blog

Pascal Charest’s Interests:

Information scalability, new technology, startup, Infrastructure scalability, high performance, high availability Kayaking, Sailing, Bouldering, Hicking, Climbing

Pascal Charest’s Groups:

IleSansFil (wifi community in montreal), WifiDog (captive portal), HAL (hub des artistes locaux, locative media)

•    On Startups - The Community For Entrepreneurs
•    Linux Expert
•    System Administrator (Windows, Linux, Unix)
•    Cloud Computing
•    The Storage Group
•    Ottawa Technology Group
•    Ottawa Area VMware User Group (VMUG)
•    The Ottawa Network
•    Ottawa Technology Network
•    Social Media Breakfast | Ottawa
•    CloudCamp - Unconventional Cloud Computing
•    Elite Ottawa Consultants
•    Montreal Technology Network - Technologie de l'information du Montreal
•    OCLUG
•    IT Focus Expert Group
•    Réseau ACTION TI - Montréal
•    Freelancers & Self-employed - Montreal, Quebec
•    The Code Factory

Pascal Charest’s Honors:

- Invited to present @ "Interactive Project Lab", at Banff, Alberta in 2006
- Wrote in LinuxJournal, january 2007 on "Embedded Devices",
- Wrote in Linux+DVD, summer 2008 on "SAN & GNU/Linux",
- See my list of presentation in my links section.