CIS Help
Request Form

Meet Greg Balin, New Manager of Production UNIX Systems

Greg Balin is the leader of the Computing Infrastructure Support Department's new Production Support Group. The group will provide operational support for the UNIX servers in the Lab's production computing infrastructure. These servers support such services as UNIX email and calendaring, the directory service, payroll, financial applications and time reporting. The goal is to make such systems "bulletproof," Balin said. Because maintaining the stability of the Lab's production systems is the group's primary objective, their systems management approach will tend to be more conservative compared to managing a development environment. As the group gets up to speed, it will provide additional system management and capacity planning tools and more effectively monitor the "health and well being" of the servers, tracking resource usage and performance. Where appropriate, many of these tasks will be automated, Balin said.

Balin has a background in systems and network management from retail and investment banking sectors. His most recent jobs were at Lehman Brothers European headquarters in London and ABN AMRO North America headquartered in Chicago. He lived in the Berkeley area before moving to London 10 years ago and wanted to return to the East Bay. He found the Lab's Web site, liked what he saw and found a position matching his skills.

"I was looking for a job that was more interesting than just making money - I'd worked in that kind of environment for 10 years," Balin said. "The Lab's environment, with its focus on supporting important and interesting science, is a welcome change."