biography
I'm Joe Vancil, and this is my story. Well, it will be, once I get the template pictures and template text removed.
Joe Vancil
I am the older adopted son of the late Jack and Winnie Vancil. I grew up in the Bootheel of southeast Missouri, on a farm between the towns of Holcomb and Campbell.
I attended Holcomb R-3 schools: Holcomb Elementary, Holcomb Jr. High, and Holcomb High School. In 1984, I graduated as the class valedictorian.
I joined the First Baptist Church of Holcomb, MO upon accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour in 1978. I remained a member there until moving my church membership to Memorial Baptist Church in Columbia, MO in 2009.
I attended the University of Missouri in Columbia, MO, where I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering in 1989.
Career
American Express Health Systems Group Associate Systems Programmer
In 1990, I joined American Express Health Systems Group in Hazelwood, Missouri, where I was an Associate Systems Programmer. The title is somewhat misleading, because I was trained as a Network Administrator for the New Products division of the company, under Sr. Vice President Don Tompkins, Director Tom Hurley, and my manager, Wally Canis. I was mentored by E. Chris Thumm, who I regard as the first major influence on my career.
While at American Express, I was trained on communications protocols, functioned in roles that could be described as Help Desk, managed rights and permissions on our Novell and Banyan networks, developed macros for status reporting, served on a wiring committee for the American Express move to Charlotte, North Carolina, set up and configured workstations, and managed multiple configurations across workstations.
Williams-Keepers / Consul-Tech Management, Inc. Network Consultant
American Express Health Systems Group was moving to Charlotte, North Carolina, but I wanted to return to Columbia, Missouri. I interviewed for a position at Williams-Keepers accounting firm, on the recommendation of a personal friend. I was offered the position, and served as a Network Consultant under Dr. Jennifer DuPont, Principal, my manager, Ron Magsamen, and team leads Christopher Miller and Dennis Burgett for the MIS department. While at Williams-Keepers, I worked closely with Ken Lange, the network administrator, and Mark Whitworth. At Williams-Keepers, I did consulting work at various locations in Columbia and the surrounding communities, as well as brought many of the methods I had learned at American Express to use on the internal 3+Share, 3+Open, and Novell networks at Williams-Keepers.
In early 1991, the MIS department of Williams-Keepers split off to form a separate consulting company, Consul-Tech Management, under the leadership of Dr. Jennifer DuPont, President, and Ron Magsamen, Vice President. I was a Network Consultant for Consul-Tech, where I did network installations and upgrades, software installations and upgrades, and various computer and network troubleshooting for business across the state of Missouri. Included among our clients were Cannon-Blaylock, Capital Bank / Union Planters Bank / Regions Bank, Moore-Shryock, Davis Paint, Parway-Tryson, Missouri Military Acadmeny, Brookfield Fabricators, and Central Missouri Sheltered Enterprises. During this time, I worked with Novell Netware 2.x, 3.x, and 4.x, Novell Netware Light, Artisoft LanTastic, and IBM PC-LAN network opearting systems, MS-DOS, Windows 3.0 and 3.1, as well as studying IBM RISC systems running AIX and AS/400 systems (although I never really worked with the RISC systems or AS/400's).
Burnam Companies / Storage Trust Realty / Public Storage Network Administrator / Director of Information Systems
In 1994, I left Consul-Tech to join my old Consul-Tech colleague, Deyan Nenov, at Burnam Companies. I served under Deyan, who was the Director of Information Systems, who reported to Chief Financial Officer Steve Dulle. Burnam Companies was undergoing a rapid expansion in preparation of going public, which it did in November 1994. The new company was Storage Trust Realty. At Storage Trust, I started as the Network Administrator, and dealt with support of the Revelation database for our property management system, support for PCs and gate systems, and data transfers to the home office, as well as software installation and maintenance for all internal workstations and the Novell Netware network.
In 1995, Deyan left Storage Trust, and I was promoted to his position as Director of Information Systems. In addition to supervising the technical staff, I was responsible for month-end processing and reporting, budget projections for internal data systems, and SEC reporting. Under my leadership, Storage Trust implemented the first electronics forms package for self-storage - SiteLink - as well as an unnamed internal system referred to as "the Numbers program," which allowed comparison and review of financial performance and property performance statistics, as well as roll-up of that information to districts and regions. In 1998, Storage Trust, at the time, the fourth largest self-storage REIT, sold to the largest self-storage REIT, Public Storage.
StorageMart Director of Information Systems
Upon the sale of Storage Trust to Public Storage, I remained with the Burnam family as we started a new self-storage company, StorageMart in 1999, starting with some of the properties that we purchased from Public Storage in markets where they were not as well established. I was the Director of Information Systems for the new company, reporting to Chief Financial Officer Steve Dulle, who I had previously served under at Storage Trust. At the start, this position involved the selection of accounting and Windows-based property management software, the implmentation of those systems, along with the new transfer mechanisms to allow the compilation of data at the home office. We converted from the previous systems - which were DOS-based - to Windows 95/Windows 98 based systems, as well as moving from the Novell Network of Storage Trust to a WIndows NT based network. This also involved converting from the older IPX protocols to TCP/IP based systems.
Carfax System Administrator / Systems Engineer / Senior Systems Engineer
In October 2000, I joined Carfax as a System Administrator on the Infrastructure Support team, under team lead Ken Brown, reporting to Infrastructure managerd Kris Knutson, under Chief Technical Officer David Silversmith, reporting to the Carfax President, Dick Raines. Carfax reorganized the leadership structure, with the department being renamed Infrastructure Services and Kris Knutson being promoted to Director, and Ken Brown being promoted to Manager of the Systems Adminstration team. In time, Ken moved to another department, and Aaron Keltner became the Manager of the Systems Adminstration Team. David Silversmith was replaced by Gary Lee as CTO. The team was renamed during a reorganization as the System Engineering, and my title was changed to Systems Engineer. Ken left the team to manage a different team, and Aaron Keltner was promoted as Manager of Systems Engineering, and Danny Staples was eventually named Team Lead. During a subsequent reorganization, Joedy Lenz was hired replacing Gary Lee as CTO, Aaron Keltner was promoted to Director of Infrastructure Services, and Kevin Sees was hired as Manager of Systems Engineering. In time, Kevin swapped departments with Ken Brown, who became Manager of Systems Engineering. Ken retired, being replaced by Michael Bland. Reorganizing once again, Steve Lottes became the Director of Systems Engineering, with he and Aaron trading several departments and titles. In 2020, Danetta Adams replaced Michael Bland as Manager of Systems Engineering, and later on, I was promoted to Senior Systems Engineer. Ryan Rademan was named as Team Lead in 2024.
Across my 24 (going on 25) years at Carfax, my service has been in technical roles, on various projects. My first project was PVCS code versioning software. Subsequent projects involved implmentation of Active Directory; upgrades to Windows - Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows 2008, Windows 2010, WIndows 2012, WIndows 2016, WIndows 2019, and WIndows 2022; installation, upgrade, and support of Paylinx credit card software; implementation and management of DFS file services; installation, upgrade, and managment of several different domains in a multi-forest, multi-domain set-up; and implementation of various security packages, back-up packages, and business software packages. I've worked with all sorts of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Cisco servers, and am the main engineer involved in our conversion of the Oracle and VMware environments to Cisco UCS systems. I oversaw the implementation and replacement of XSIGO systems.
However, if I'm known for something at Carfax, it's my work with VMware. I've been responsible for the VMware environment at Carfax since it was first installed, starting with Version 2.5 of ESX and Version 1.5 of VirtualCenter. I've done upgrades since that time, using systems including Oracle databases to support Virtual Center before VCenter moved to Postgres, conversion of VCenter from Windows-based systems to the appliance version of VCenter, upgrades to 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, 4.1, 5.0, 5.1, 5.5, 6.0, 6.5, 6.7, 7.0, and most recently, 8.0 of ESX/ESXi, implementations of Site Recovery Manager, Skyline, VMware Operations Manager, as well as associated packages such as VMTurbo/Turbonomic, VCE's VBlock, and Rubrik backup software. I have been part of all of the hardware replacements for the envrionment during that time, including migration work on the various SAN systems we have used.
Under the most recent re-assignment of duties, my responsibilities as Enterprise Administrator and Domain Administrator for the main Carfax domain have been re-assigned off-team (although my responsibilties for Enterprise and Domain Administration of our Production and Beta environments supporting our file tranferring systems and our experiment LAB domain remain). Included in my current responsibilites are the final line of support of the Windows server environment, reporting of month-end information for the VMware and Windows environments, planning hardware replacement of Oracle and VMware UCS systems and blades, moving our File Services environment to NetApp NAS systems, implementation of GPO-based replacements of security hardening (moving it out of the Windows Chef environment), and planning of the move to VMware Cloud Foundation. The teams I most often work with are the Enterprise & Facilities Management team, the Automation Team, the Observability team, the Network Engineering team, the OMS team, the Identity team, the Systems & Collaboration Team, the Database Engineering team, and the Security team.
Basketball Coach
I'll tell about Upward and the Greyhounds here.
