User:Vittorio Memmo

Brief personal presentation

Hi folks!
My name is Vittorio Memmo, I'm a professional from Italy in a fairly wide range of Information Technology products and services.
My expertise is primarly focused on server systems built upon Linux and based on Open Source solutions, thanks not only to my researcher-style cultural background concerning high performance pure-computing environments, but mainly to my mindset and on-the-field capabilities.
Linux has been a distinctive key point in my professional activity and Fedora was particularly useful for me, an excellent "swiss army knife" tool, very well made, despite the scepticism some customers usually show in favour of commercially oriented Linux and other Unix-like distributions.
Linux can run on almost any platform, powering from mythical microcomputer of the '90s to large mainframes and server farms up to petaflops grade supercomputers, its great versatility makes it possible to build systems in a way that brings up the best in every usage scanario, its kernel can be deeply modified and even rewritten to suit even the most diverse requirements.
Although I'm mainly a self-taught person - yes, I've never attained certification courses and I'm proud of not to be branded a goat! - jokes aside I believe certifications give a confined view of the reality, although a starting point for newbies - during my activity as Field Application Engineer and Pre-sales support specialist at the beginning, then as System Engineer, currently as IT Consultant and Systems Analyst, I’ve achieved many successful objectives leveraging my expertise in researching the solution to problems other persons couldn’t easily find.
A kind of inventor in the field of technology, an individual, as many other guys around the world, who has got the knowledge, intuition, creativity, technical know-how and passion to turn his ideas into real-life.
"Be the users to control the software not the software to control the users" in a freedom and sharing framework: this is why I've joined the Fedora Linux community.

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Activities within Fedora

• Ambassador

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Attended Fedora events

• FUDCon Milan 2011 [1]

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Success stories

Linux a fast-growing, powerful, reliable and inexpensive operating system has proved to be very flexible not only as a major player in the large server farms and in the most demanding computing centers around the world but also in small and mid-sized server field in which I have worked in the early years of my job activity, and is becoming an increasingly viable platform for workstation and desktop use as well.
Among the others I've realised:

a high performance cost-effective computing-cluster for scientific calculation based entirely on a Fedora Linux platform with a customized tuned kernel built upon COTS technologies for Technical Physics research activities.
The cluster has been realised for both batch and real time execution of customized calculation processes developed by students and researchers in C++ and Fortran programming languages for implementing algorithms that usually require heavy duty calculations in various fields of applied Physics such as Fluid Dynamics, Digital Image processing and Environmental Noise Analysis that would require days or even weeks of execution time on normal equipped workstations, making capacity planning possible in the meantime.
The department researchers can also rely on a robust high-availability on-demand central calculation equipment for supporting Grid Mathematica® symbolic processor parallelization capabilities of running more calculation tasks in parallel.

a Nagios® server monitoring about 500 hosts and 1900 services to a Central Government site entirely based on Fedora 10. I've developed shell scripts for integration with the ticketing system (the monitoring system is able to open service requests based on certain detected events) and various customizations to support customer specific needs and to satisfy SLA contract constrains. The result is great: the Fedora 10 based system, runs rock solid since January 2009 and the monitoring facility is the foundation of the entire system management activity in a so mission critical environment.

an increasing set of Nagios® plugins written in Bash for monitoring the most diverse parameters and events minimizing systems overhead.

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Future plans

Presently I'm working on other ideas based on Fedora Linux.
Fedora is my reference Linux distribution. I'm looking forward to continue building Fedora based servers for the customers I'll work for.
Among my most recent projects:

OpenAIS/Corosync-Pacemaker managed HA physical cluster designed for both high availability and power demanding applications running on a strictly physical environment for performance maximizing, while sharing resources with a XEN-virtualized environment dedicated to tests and pre-production simulations.

A Beowulf-style cluster leveraging powerful open-source resource managers and job-schedulers like Torque and Maui, implementing the most recent developments in frameworks, libraries, APIs and capacity planning challenges.

A set of scripts suitable for Nagios and other monitoring systems based on SystemTap for monitoring Linux systems, particularly the kernel, in fine details, allowing the system analysts to undertake the appropriate tuning strategy.

Such projects are being studied by myself in my spare time. People that would collaborate on such field is welcome!

"The scientific method, according to which a complex problem can be broken down into simpler problems, is in keeping with Linux's phylosophy of providing small tools that can be tied together or suitably combined into powerful scripts to accomplish even very complex tasks".

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About the author

Vittorio Memmo was born in Lanciano, a little town located in Abruzzo region nearby the Adriatic Sea.
After having studied Physics in the university for 6 years , he started Exin Lab in 2000, a little personal business concerning information technology services
for small and medium enterprise customers.
In the meantime he kept on study and research activity improving proficiency in HA and MPP clusters as well as GRID
systems for high-performance computing dedicated scientific applications.
He's dedicating many hours of his life to studying, researching, testing, inventing.
Presently he works as a System Engineer for one among the main information technology companies, delivering consultancy services
for governament, large enterprises and military headquaters datacenters.

"In many fields of technology and science there are often multiple ways to accomplish a task, so you have always something to learn even if you think to be already competent in an area".