Nikhil Thammala

About

IBM Power/AIX infrastructure engineer who owned a very large production estate (12 Power9 E980 frames and 400+ AIX 7.2 LPARs) with deep hands-on expertise in VIOS/vHMC, DLPAR, and PowerHA. Demonstrated strong incident response (zero-downtime DLPAR fix; split-brain prevention during storage failure) and modernization skills spanning Jenkins/Ansible CI/CD and Terraform automation for IBM Power Virtual Server/PowerVC.

Key Strengths

• Owned large-scale IBM Power/AIX footprint (12 Power9 E980 frames, 400+ AIX 7.2 LPARs) with HA design (dual vHMC, redundant VIOS, NPIV, SEA)
• End-to-end DLPAR troubleshooting with zero downtime (RMC heartbeat/firewall port issue; RSCT recfgct remediation) and implemented fleet-wide weekly health checks
• Led PowerHA recovery during storage-controller failure; prevented split-brain by freezing resource groups and validating storage reservations; improved heartbeat redundancy post-RCA
• Planned and executed AIX 6.1 to 7.2 migrations using minute-by-minute cutover plans, Go/No-Go gates, and fast rollback via mksysb + Alt-Disk cloning
• Strong AIX performance triage across CPU/memory/disk/network using native tooling (topas/nmon/vmstat/iostat/fcstat/netstat) plus deeper tracing (curt/splat)
• Built secure, repeatable CI/CD for AIX deployments (Jenkins + Ansible) with Vault-injected secrets, gated approvals, Artifactory versioning, and improved reliability via pre-flight checks

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