Customized Training. DB management optimization for high speed storage in a centralized process control computer system

Custom training for staff members in charge to design and develop Production Plant Supervision Systems

Kluster.it is an Application Service Provider. We designed and deployed a robust, secure and highly available system platform to deliver application services to customers like CMS, dedicated search engines, e-commerce, SMS advertising other than regular hosting services (DNS, corporate email, web hosting, instant messaging). The design of the platform was based on Linux Virtual server Cluster with a double director configuration. Several web servers and redundant servers for file and database storage. We used OpenCMS, a JSP open source CMS platform by Alkacom, with a Proxy Server. Qmail and LDAP were used for corporate email. Nutch, a project from the Apache Foundation was used to realize dedicated search engine.

ASTM is a small company which specializes in supplying technology services to the Steel Industry world wide. The company wanted to develop a new Rolling Mill Control System for his customers with the main goal of simplifying maintenance while improving scalability of the HMI systems in the plant areas. We used windows 2003 server as an application and terminal server, while using embedded Linux running on PC104 cards as thin-client running a browser and the JVM so achieving the goal of saving the existent windows based application for process control of the Rolling Mill plant. Java was used to develop the Human Machine Interface application. Process and production data were collected and stored in XML format as well as plant and process configuration parameters. Embedded Linux and remote booting were used for the HMI's in such way to create a single point of access for system administrators. A secure access system was created to allow remote process troubleshooting and control.

Geoworld is a unique company involved in many activities related with the geological sciences. The company trades fossils, publishes scientific books, and owns a chain of 50 stores located in malls all other Italy to sell jewelry, precious stones and luxury ethnic objects selected and purchased worldwide. Managed the complete overhaul of the ERP system of the company. My duties included the analysis and mapping of business processes, vendor selection and bidding, and managing the implementation with the chosen vendors. We used two different software vendors. One to supply the ERP software to manage enterprise operations and the retail operations in the company's stores, including daily data collection to propose automatically generated purchase orders. On time Sales statistics were to be delivered to senior management. The second vendor supplied the Warehouse Management System to be strictly integrated with the ERP system.

This company was an Italian pioneer in the ASP business. I was part of a team of three experts in charge to design and deploy the platform infrastructure which had to be secure, robust and highly scalable. We used Linux LVS and a set of 28 IBM servers to build the virtual machine, one of the first in Europe in 2001 by establishing a partnership with IBM – Italia which supplied us with the first fiber channel based storage system, still not supported by the official Linux kernel in 2001. The project was a technical success, but the burst of the Internet bubble forced the VC to shutdown the project and the company. The platform solution was designed from the ground up. We used a double director solution with LVS. 15 servers were use as web front end, 4 for storage, 4 for mail services, three for application servers. The system was to provide CMS, web hosting, corporate mail, collaboration services, instant messaging, on demand storage and database services, and built by choosing best of breed Oped Source software packages. We used LDAP for distributed authentication, Zope as application server, Jabber for instant messaging. Java, Python, Perl and C++ where used to build customized interfaces and the control system of the platform itself.

Spray is a Swedish Internet concern who acquired Clarence.com, an Italian Internet portal with more than 120 millions page views and 1,5 millions unique visitor a month. I was one of the founders of Clarence.com laying the technical foundation of the first Italian Virtual Community. Clarence supplied news, community services like forum and chat, free web mail, Internet dial up access, ad servings, and free SMS services to deliver logos and ring tones to other 100.000 registered users. We serviced the first and mos popular Italian Web-Chat and the first Forum, since 1995. To build the platform to support portal services and to keep costs low, Open Source technology was a mandatory choice. Web serving was based on a LVS cluster of over 50 front ends while application servicing used JSP and PHP. The SMS serving platform was quite unique and was running on four PHP based, Apache application server, storing data on a Postgress database. Clarence.com also wanted built a virtual city for its community members, a completely custom project where the main challenge was to provide cheap storage space by using the early releases of NFS3.

AGSL was a small team of 15 highly specialized professionals in charge to develop and maintain Oracle AIM, Application Implementation Methodology. This is the methodology that Oracle Consulting uses to support ERP implementation for medium size to large corporation. In charge of designing and implementing solution for Oracle Manufacturing Applications customers. Co-author of Oracle Business Architect, a set of tools to map business functions and process to application functionalities in a top-down approach designed to help the implementation teams in charge to deploy ERP solution based on Oracle Applications. The tool was designed to be used by the plus 5.000 consultant in the Oracle Organization. The tools was designed to be web enabled, using locally installed components on consultant laptops. A Javascript engine was developed to access an XML database and locally stored documents. The tools was designed to have auto-installing, auto-updating and self-healing capabilities. OBA was developed using Microsoft Visio as graphic engine. Tight integration between components was achieved by developing special ActiveX component interface between Visio and Oracle-Lite.

Ceda specializes in developing process automation and control systems for the Steel Industry worldwide. During my years with Ceda I was in charge of several projects: . Automatic Warehouse Management: 2 plants in Belarus, former Soviet Union, data collection, and material handling robots coordination . Steel Plant supervision system : two projects one in Mexico and one in Italy. . Rolling Mill Plant supervision : one project for a complete integrated system in the US.

While working for Ceda I had a chance to design my systems from the ground up, using different technologies for different part of systems. Data acquisition card required customized firmware to be developed using assembly language. Just adopted ethernet technology required delving into ISO/OSI specifications to build PC driver using C language. Fortran was the language for process control on Digital PDP 11 with the RSX11 plus operating system and Digital VAX clusters using VMS. Oracle DMBS was used for process and production data storage and retrieval. The main goals of our systems were to achieve extreme robustness, high-availability and fail-over capabilities, or reliable and controlled manual backup, to tame the complexities of steel making plant. As chief engineer I received trained to implement software development methodology in my department, creating a standard for software documentation and archiving.