About the Authors
Ken Pepple is an IT Architect in the Sun Professional Services (SunPS) Asia Pacific practice. In this role, he assists clients with enterprise computing architectures, concentrating on advanced data center projects. In addition to these activities, Ken recently co-authored, with David Hornby, the Sun BluePrints[tm] book, "Consolidation in the Data Center: Simplifying IT Environments to Reduce Total Cost of Ownership".
Before moving to his current position, Ken managed the SunPS high-end platform services program, and focused on complex performance issues for the IT Consulting and Operations practice. While there, he co-authored and taught the Sun Education seminar "Solaris Performance and Tuning Secrets".
Brian Down has been at Sun for five years in Sun's Global Sales Organization as a Senior Staff Engineer and most recently in SunPS where he holds the position of Chief Architect for Enterprise Migration for the Americas. For several years, Brian has focused on developing Sun's migration methodology and solution strategy, helping to develop and identify the value proposition associated with such implementations. Prior to joining SunPS, Brian focused on performance and custom engineering initiatives related to strategic server installations for the GSO.
With over 25 years of industry experience, Brian has held various engineering positions ranging from senior engineer with a computer security company to that of Research Associate for the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he worked for over 10 years.
David Levy is a Senior Consultant in the SunPS United Kingdom (UK) organization. He is currently leading the program for the UK's Consolidation and Migration team, concentrating on data center architectures and economics. Prior to this role, Dave led the UK's financial services consulting team based in London. Dave has successfully completed numerous consolidation and migration projects for banking and media customers.
Before working for Sun, Dave worked for a number of financial services, IT manufacturing, and government organizations, primarily as a database architect and engineer. Dave has authored presentations for the Oracle and Sybase user groups and is a member of the British Computer Society and Chartered Institute of Management. Dave is an Honors graduate of the University of Exeter, where he majored in Economics.