Lai Zit Seng

lzs

I'm the Principal IT Architect in the School of Computing, National University of Singapore, where I am principally responsible for all IT infrastructure services. My portfolio includes data centre, network, server, storage, and security operations, among others. I have been at this job since 1999.

I have a personal blog at zitseng.com. The blog is published in my personal capacity, and the contents therein do not reflect the views of my employer.

You can reach me via email at myinitials at nus dot edu dot sg or call +65 66011088.

Current Work

My role as the Principal IT Architect principally responsible for all IT infrastructure services in the School of Computing (SoC) is very broad. I manage data centre, network, server, storage, and security operations. I lead a cross-functional team of skilled engineers and technicians. I also run the IT operations of the National Cybersecurity Research and Development Lab. I have further ancillary roles relating to building facilities, procurement, and technical consultation. I am involved in numerous ad-hoc projects, such as NUS' organisational excellence exercise, and in recent years, run the technical operations of some national and international IT events.

SoC is unique in being the ony faculty in the university that operates its own IT infrastructure. We are extremely hands-on, running all our services in-house, without relying on outsourcing any technical functions.

Quite unusually, while being primarily an IT-person, I am somewhat familiar with the facilities side of data centre operations. We manage data centre facilities, such as the electrical and mechanical services (including HVAC, fire protection, etc), and building management systems.

We have two data centres in different parts of Kent Ridge Campus. The two sites provide us with a small degree of geogrpahical separation for purpose of localised disaster isolation. We designed and use extensive facilities monitoring capabilities, enabling us to easily perform remote diagnostic and assessment of data centre faults. We host high-density compute servers of up to 20 kW per rack.

As a computing school, SoC a very high density of networked devices, including servers (both physical and virtual macine instances), mobile devices, and other gadgets. Our network is relatively large and complex to cater to the different use requirements. We run a complete suite of network sevices, including wired and wireless switching, distribution and core switching and routing, VPN, firewalls, application load balancers and SSL acclerators.

We run many servers, including Solaris on SPARC/x86 and Linux on x86 platforms. We have a large compute cluster to support high performance computing, and we also run an Openstack environment.

Our storage facilities include SAN storage clusters as well as Ceph running on commodity x86 servers.

Other Work

I routinely avail myself for speaking engagements in the following areas:

Please contact me if you wish to invite me to speak in any of my areas of expertise.

Awards and Certifications

I received the Commendation Medal at the National Day Awards in 2009.

I am also a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) member since 2003.

Past Work

Prior to joining the School of Computing, I was a Research Officer at the Internet Research and Development Unit, which is also a part of the National University of Singapore. My work at that time was primarily in advanced research and education networks, and my time was mostly spent in the Singapore Advanced Research and Education Network (SingAREN).