Snowball – IGN

High-Level CV Overview

Director of Computing
May to August 1999

Affiliation Networks / Snowball Inc. / IGN – ign.com
South San Francisco, California

 

 

IGN’s main focus:
To be the globally leading content aggregation website in gaming media. Start-up Affiliation Networks was a spin-off from the print-based Imagine Media (Brisbane, California) to build a new company for their internet-based business. This was a content aggregation company based on the exclusive contribution from content providing affiliates, and operated web sites such as ign.com (one of the largest gaming sites), chickclick.com, powerstudents.com, insideguide.com, and various other target markets.

My role:
Build out and improved the infrastructure, hired additional technical talent.

  • Planned, staffed, and managed corporate IT & Internet operations
  • Re-designed and managed Internet presense for the largest gaming site on the Internet
  • Managed ownership transfer for 700+ Internet domain names
  • Migrated over 400 content aggregators (affiliates) to the companies’ Internet presence

In detail:

  • Stabilized and documented the existing environment,
  • Planned and negotiated additional technical capabilities:
    • SLAs,
    • Pricing with several vendors for the scaling of the rapidly growing traffic (42 MB/s sustained, bursts up to 70 MB/s)
    • Architecting two new data centers on East and West coasts,
    • High-speed data replication between databases via ATM PVC,
    • Registering for an Autonomous System Number (ASN) to allow for load balancing and redundancy between new data centers,
    • Outsourcing options for the traffic management/ BGP4 routing to stick to the core business of content aggregation,
    • Planned, researched and negotiated completely redundant storage solutions for the offices and data centers (including providing secure content publishing solution).
    • Migrated affiliates onto a temporary hosting solution (theforce.net – the largest StarWars site; and meccaworld.com),
    • Developed a redundant hosting solution for up to 400 affiliates.
    • Planned and negotiated networks and phone systems (upgrades for SF office, temporary and new New York office, networking between PBXs),
    • Private network connection via ATM PVC between offices (service bundling with ISP for cost efficiency),
    • Hired core technical staff,
    • Set up 7×24 NOC (also for support of up to 400 affiliates around the globe),
    • Centralized firewall administration for offices and data center backdoor access,
    • VPN solution,
    • Certificate Server for easy user remote access,
    • Handled all regular MIS tasks.