IT Director, sysadmin, and engineer
Nathan Dodson, MBA
I run IT operations and strategy at a regional distributor based in Lenexa, KS. Always trying to grow, learn, and apply new ideas to past knowledge.
Head to the experience page for my full professional and educational history, or explore some hand-picked stories showcasing the work I’m most proud of. I look forward to connecting with you soon~
Stories
A few stories from recent work
Building Resiliency: A Production Failover Cluster for a Two-Person Team
P Before this project, production virtual machines ran on infrastructure without a real failover story — a single hardware fault on the…
A I designed and built a production Windows Server Failover Cluster (internally named prod1) across three Dell PowerEdge R660 nodes (HV1…
O Regal now has genuine hardware failure tolerance for its production virtual environment — 14 VMs that can survive a single node failure…
Moving Off Our Own Premise: A Cloud Phone System Migration
P Regal ran its phone system on an on-premise solution — hardware we owned, maintained, and were responsible for keeping alive, with all the…
A I scoped this as a 3-month project with a clear target: get fully off the on-premise PBX and onto a cloud-based solution, without a…
O Regal moved off on-premise phone hardware entirely within the 3-month window, eliminating the maintenance and single-point-of-failure risk…
A Deliberate Hybrid Cloud Strategy — Not All or Nothing
P As Regal's IT function matured, the natural pressure was to follow the industry default and move everything to the cloud — SaaS for…
A I approached this as a hybrid strategy rather than a single migration project: critical, high-change-risk, or naturally cloud-native…
O The result is a company that isn't locked into any single cloud vendor or SaaS provider by default, and a two-person team that can stand…
Keeping the Lights On: Infrastructure Reliability Through an ERP Go-Live
P A live ERP cutover is disruptive enough on its own — new workflows, new software, staff relearning how to do their jobs. Ours landed in…
A Because the network and server foundation for the new facility (dual-WAN internet, segmented VLANs, the Meraki firewall stack, and the…
O The ERP cutover ran without an infrastructure-caused outage or connectivity gap — no lost warehouse scans, no WiFi dead zones, no ISP…
Relocating Headquarters and Building a Warehouse Network From the Ground Up
P Regal Distributing relocated its headquarters and warehouse operations to a new 198,715 sq ft facility at 11280 Britton Street in Lenexa…
A I designed and led implementation of a 12-section network plan covering the new facility end to end: 8 VLANs segmenting management…
O The new facility went live on the planned timeline with dual-ISP redundancy, a segmented and secured network design, and zero unplanned…
Modernizing the Core: AD Redesign, PKI, and a Full Hardware Refresh
P Regal's core infrastructure had grown organically under the prior MSP relationship: legacy Active Directory structure, no internal…
A I treated this as one connected modernization push rather than a series of disconnected upgrades:
O The result is infrastructure the two-person team can actually stand behind: a segmented, documented, monitored environment instead of a…
Building an In-House IT Department From Zero
P Regal Distributing — a $150M foodservice and jan/san distributor with about 75 employees across office, warehouse, and driver staff — ran…
A [Fill in: how you actually sequenced this — e.g. audited existing MSP contracts/systems first, took over specific services one at a time…
O Within [fill in: timeframe], Regal moved from full MSP dependency to a self-sufficient, two-person internal IT function supporting roughly…