Erik M. Soroka

Director, Information Technology & Data Center Operations · InMotion Hosting

Seventeen years ago I started on the support desk at InMotion Hosting, after founding and running two companies of my own. Five roles later, I lead our Information Technology and Data Center Operations. I didn’t learn systems from the outside—I helped build them. That still shapes how I work: close to the infrastructure, close to the people who keep it running.

What I lead

Five teams report into my organization:

Global Network Operations
Global Data Center Operations
Tier 3 Systems Engineering
Tier 2 Systems Administration
Internal Information Technology

Between them they cover the network, the physical facilities across our regions, our security operations, after-hours escalations, day-to-day systems administration, and the corporate IT function — the path from a rack in a data center to a laptop on someone's desk, and the work of keeping it running.

What I do

Design, resilience, performance and scalability of enterprise server and data center environments — including four full data center migrations across Los Angeles and Ashburn, planned, negotiated and executed end to end
Greenfield build-out and launch of two new facilities in Amsterdam and Singapore, extending the footprint into Europe and Asia-Pacific
Backup Manager, a customer-facing product add-on I architected and launched, backed by multi-petabyte redundant distributed object storage clusters built on Ceph
Business continuity and disaster recovery — customer and internal systems across our regions, kept running and restored when a facility or a core system fails
Enterprise security posture, with monitoring built on automation and open-source tooling
Ensure end-user device management, hardening, security and support (Internal IT)
Capacity and compliance — data center space, server capacity, licensing
The data center operational budget, and vendor partnerships and contract negotiation
Executive escalation for critical incidents and outages — on the call with the teams restoring service or peak performance, through the decision that ends the incident
Empower safe adoption of emerging AI technology to enable productivity and limit risk
Business intelligence that makes operational reality legible to people making decisions

I also advise the Board of Directors on operational strategy and organizational development. A growing share of the job has nothing to do with technology at all: mentoring the next set of leaders and making sure the people running critical systems and networks are set up to do it well and are fully supported. Decades of experience can not be coached overnight, but the next generation needs a strong foundation to build upon, and that’s precisely “What I do”.

Technical background

Enterprise Linux, PHP and Python, MariaDB and MySQL, network architecture and protocols, and virtualization from Virtuozzo and OpenVZ through OpenStack. Data center work has kept me closer to the hardware than most people at this level stay — controllers, arrays and capacity are still things I reason about directly rather than only in summary.

InMotion Hosting

Virginia Beach, Virginia · March 2009 – present

Director, Information Technology & Data Center Operations

Feb 2021 – Present · 5 yrs 7 mos
Senior Manager, Information Technology

Dec 2017 – Feb 2021 · 3 yrs 3 mos
Manager, Tier 3 Architecture Department

Mar 2013 – Dec 2017 · 4 yrs 9 mos
Tier 3 Linux System Administrator

Feb 2010 – Mar 2013 · 3 yrs 1 mo
Tier 1 Advanced Support Representative

Mar 2009 – Feb 2010 · 11 mos

Before InMotion

1998 – 2009

The Linux Laptop Company

Founder & Chief Executive Officer · founded May 2007
KIREnet Communications

Founder & Chief Executive Officer · founded May 1998

Two companies I founded and ran myself, a decade apart — the first while the commercial internet was still being built out, the second around Linux on consumer hardware at a point when that was still an awkward proposition. Running them meant owning everything: the engineering, the customers, the books.

About

Originally from New England, now based in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I have been part of the Linux community since 1997 — long enough to have administered systems through several complete turns of the technology, from bare-metal RAID controllers and OpenVZ containers to the platforms that replaced them.

For about a decade I wrote publicly about that work: disk recovery, MySQL internals, DNS, monitoring, and the unglamorous operational problems that fill a systems administrator's week.

Technical Archives

25 posts written between 2010 and 2017, spanning the years I moved from the support desk into systems administration and then into management. They are worth keeping for a reason beyond nostalgia: the monitoring, security, database and virtualization work described in them is the same ground I am now responsible for at enterprise scale. The archive is where that experience was earned, one failing disk and one runaway InnoDB file at a time.

Browse the archives →