Consultant - Datacentre

**About Block**

We are an IT innovation business, offering expert consultancy, business transformation and managed services that empower clients to do great things. Were passionate and enthusiastic about what we do, and we use our expertise along with our technical capability to work in partnership with our clients to help increase productivity, accelerate growth and deliver outstanding user experiences through our technology and service propositions.

**The Opportunity**

The Datacentre Consultant works within the Workspace & Cloud practice delivering support and proactive managed services from the Block Operations Centre to clients across retail and healthcare. The Datacentre Consultant is responsible for ensuring that Cloud, Workspace and Datacentre managed services are delivered to Blocks internal staff and enterprise clients within agreed service levels. Focus is in meeting our clients business, technical and IT service management needs. The result being right first time, quality managed services.

**Role Responsibilities**
- First contact call handling services
- Recording and monitoring of all fault calls & requests for service
- Deliver incident and problem management activities to agreed service levels
- Deliver monitoring and managed services activities to agreed service levels including:

- Requests for Service
- Real time monitoring and alerting
- Capacity management services
- OS Patch Management services
- Backup Services
- End of Life/End of Sales Lifecycle Management services
- Hardware and software maintenance and management
- Vendor management to agreed client service levels
- Production and maintenance of technical methods to enable the successful delivery of services
- Ensure ongoing document management control including technical operating policies and procedures production

Other Service Management activities
- Assess, Evaluate and Authorise change within the client managed service environments
- Ensure ongoing document management control including technical operating policies and procedures production
- Working with Service Control to ensure full lifecycle management of Data Centre Service assets from purchase through to service cessation, including the ongoing maintenance of client Configuration Management Database items

**Essential Skills, Knowledge & Experience**
- ITIL Foundation
- Strong technical background, working towards achieving professional level technical capabilities (VMware VCP, Azure Fundamentals)
- Experience working within change control environment
- Proven technical experience operating technical infrastructure in enterprise data centre and cloud environments. Technology areas include:

- ** Microsoft Core Stack **Active Directory, Group Policy, DNS and DHCP
- ** Storage** DellEMC Unity storage arrays and VPLEX clusters
- ** Compute **Cisco UCS
- ** Virtualisation** VMware vSphere
- ** Backup **Veeam, DellEMC Data Domain
- ** Cloud **Microsoft Azure, Azure Active Directory, IaaS, PaaS

**Desirable Experience**
- ** Storage **DellEMC Isilon, XtremIO, PowerStore
- ** Hyperconverged **Cisco Hyperflex and/or DellEMC VxRail
- ** Cloud **Microsoft Azure Networking, Network Security Groups, Azure Firewall
- ** Backup **Azure Backup
- ** ITSM **Experience working with ServiceNow
- ** Monitoring **Solarwinds and/or LogicMonitor
- ** Microsoft 365 **Exchange and SharePoint management
- ** Scripting** PowerShell, Python
- Operations Readiness - Ensure that the services can be managed, operated and supported in accordance with Services sold

**Personal Attributes**
- Reliable and consistent individual, with a track record of delivering IT services to good industry standards (ITIL, DevOps) without compromise on quality or client experience
- Results orientated, possessing excellent problem-solving skills, able to work to deadlines, meeting and exceeding client service levels
- Proactive approach in the development of new ways of working that optimise, mature and enhance service delivery
- Ability to help and develop other team members through coaching and knowledge sharing
- An effective and open communicator, both written and verbal. Able to listen and learn from all engagements
- Continually improving, with an attention to detail, caring about quality and delivering client value

**Person specification**:
Block is an equal opportunities employer, committed to providing equal opportunities regardless of race or ethnic origin, gender identity, family situation, sexual orientation, disability, religion or age. This person specification is designed to help members of Interviewing Panels judge the qualities of interviewees in a systematic and consistent way and in accordance with Blocks equal opportunities policy.