How I got here

I'm Nick Manganiello. You'll find Nicolas Manganiello on paperwork, but Nick is what I go by. I've spent most of my life building systems.

I started experimenting with computers on Windows 95 around age five, built my first PC from spare parts at seven — it ran Windows 98 SE — and started DJing at eight. By fourteen I was operating DJN Event Productions and doing independent IT consulting for small businesses.

From there the work expanded in a few directions at once: enterprise infrastructure, theatrical and event production, AV systems, construction, and facilities. They look like separate disciplines until you're standing in a server room, a theater, a manufacturing plant, or an offshore lighthouse and realize the same things matter every time — power, signal, networking, structure, redundancy, and making the whole system work when people actually need it.

Early systems

The computers came first. There was a family machine running Windows 95, and by seven I had assembled my own from spare parts and gotten Windows 98 SE running on it. Taking things apart to see why they worked never really stopped; it just moved on to bigger things.

The music gear came next. I started DJing at eight, and the early equipment was pieced together from the places a Long Island kid could actually get to — Music Trends in East Meadow, Sam Ash, the Guitar Center in Westbury. Learning signal flow on mixers and amplifiers turned out to be the same discipline as learning it on networks; I just didn't know that yet.

DJN and early consulting

At fourteen, two things started in the same year: DJN Event Productions, which I've owned and operated ever since, and independent IT consulting for small businesses.

The consulting work was full-stack small-business infrastructure: network design and implementation, Windows Server 2003 through 2012, Active Directory and Small Business Server, storage, backup and disaster recovery, VoIP phone systems, Wi-Fi, structured cabling, and Office 365 migrations. When you're the only IT person a company has, you learn every layer, because there's nobody else to hand a problem to.

DJN grew the same way. It started as DJ work and became a production company: live events, but also consulting and design for permanent installations at restaurants, bars, clubs, and catering halls — AV design, sound reinforcement, lighting and architectural lighting, control systems, networking, and integration. Along the way I've consulted for organizations including National Event Connection and The Suffolk Theater in Riverhead.

Theater and production

Around sixteen I started building theatrical sets, and that pulled a whole second trade into focus. Through Sanford H. Calhoun High School's theater program I learned set construction, lighting, and audio under Sal Salerno, the program's technical director. The same years brought framing, electrical, finish carpentry, trim and cabinetry, low-voltage and holiday lighting design — the physical-world skills that later turned out to matter as much in data centers as they do on stages.

The other door into production was the Davidson family. Donald Davidson of HDH Davidson was a longtime family friend and a professional event-production mentor; I worked productions and jobs under him for years. His son Harley is my best friend — he grew up in production, brought me into Calhoun's theater program and into his father's work, and we've built Bellmore-Merrick school district productions and events together. A significant amount of what I know about theatrical set design, production systems, and FOH sound, I learned from Harley.

Enterprise infrastructure

The small-business consulting grew into enterprise work in 2014, when I joined CHIPS Technology Group as a senior network engineer and solutions architect. I did the pre-sales architecture — discovery, solution design, migration plans, proposals, RFP responses, SOWs — and then kept implementation ownership of what I designed and sold. That's the fastest honesty mechanism in this business: you don't over-promise a design you know you'll be racking yourself.

Seven years there added up: infrastructure designed and implemented across more than three hundred customer offices; Citrix and Microsoft RDS platforms architected for five-thousand-plus users on hundreds of servers; a multi-tenant VMware data center with a dedicated virtual firewall, routing and VPN stack per customer; and technical integration for more than fifty mergers and acquisitions spanning a hundred-plus sites and companies — Active Directory and identity, email, endpoints, networks, backup, and the site cutovers that make an acquisition real.

In 2021 I moved to Leviton, where the work grew into principal-level infrastructure architecture for a global manufacturer: reference designs, technical standards and platform roadmaps across cloud, networking, virtualization, compute, storage, backup and disaster recovery, endpoint management, identity, wireless and security — plus architectural direction for globally distributed engineers, vendor and technology selection, and the escalations that come with being the technical authority on cross-domain problems.

The flagship was cloud. I designed, built and migrated roughly four hundred production workloads into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, owning the target architecture across OCVS, OCI networking, HCX, NSX, Palo Alto security, storage, backup and DR — and built a self-testing disaster recovery data center spanning multiple OCI regions. The migration ran on waves, dependency maps, runbooks and rollback plans, with more than seventy-five application and IT people on the cutover, testing and acceptance calls.

Around it, the platform work: VMware transformed from five sites into a standardized environment across twenty-five-plus locations, dozens of clusters and some ninety hosts. A Veeam redesign across every site, backed by a dedicated replication data center, a continent-wide North American DR data center, and ransomware-resilient recovery — immutability, administrative separation, and automated recovery testing. A WAN migration off legacy MPLS onto Meraki SD-WAN, ClearPass NAC behind it, and IT/OT segmentation across manufacturing floors. And the endpoint layer: Intune and Autopilot architecture for three-thousand-plus Windows endpoints with certificate-based authentication over SCEP and Cloud PKI, alongside thousands of mobile devices and rugged scanners in plants and warehouses.

Building facilities, not just racks

A lot of infrastructure work assumes the room already exists. Mine usually hasn't. At CHIPS I designed and built more than two hundred offices and facilities from bare walls — healthcare, finance, legal, manufacturing, warehousing and logistics, engineering — owning the delivery from electrical requirements, HVAC load and UPS sizing through MDF/IDF design, structured cabling and fiber, predictive Wi-Fi design and RF surveys in Ekahau, AV and conference rooms, and the electricians, HVAC techs, low-voltage crews and general contractors it takes to land all of it on opening day.

At Leviton the same work continues at manufacturer scale: sales offices, LIVE centers, plant expansions, relocations and acquired sites, from construction drawings through commissioning and handoff. The theatrical construction background does more work here than any certification: I can read the building, not just the rack elevation.

The lighthouse

For more than a decade I've worked with Harley and the HDH Davidson crew on the Huntington Lighthouse Preservation Society's Labor Day weekend Music Fest — a rock concert staged on an operating lighthouse in the middle of Huntington Bay. Harley leads the production; my areas are lighting design, programming and operation, video deployment, and the production networking, and I work cabling, rigging, power distribution, and load-in/load-out alongside the rest of the crew.

It's a serious production in an environment that offers you nothing: Meyer Sound line arrays with distributed fills, professional FOH audio, architectural lighting on the lighthouse itself, moving heads, multichannel recording, video production, and livestreams to multiple platforms — all running on temporary LAN and WAN infrastructure with cellular uplinks, designed and built onsite, over water, every year. If you want to know why this site treats networking and lighting as one subject, the lighthouse is the answer.

Stratora

I'm the founder of Stratora — self-hosted infrastructure monitoring and operational visibility for real-world IT and OT environments. It grew out of years of operating exactly that kind of mixed infrastructure and wanting better eyes on it. It has its own site, so I'll keep it short here.

What I'm doing now

Principal-level infrastructure architecture; running DJN; building Stratora; the lighthouse every Labor Day weekend; and writing things up here as I go. The writing is the part I've neglected the longest — this site is the fix.

Away from the racks, I'm happily married to my wife Gina, we have one son, Luke, and there's my little buddy Rocco — a wheaten terrier.

Elsewhere

The writing lives at /writing and selected builds are on the projects page. Otherwise I'm on LinkedIn and GitHub, and the companies are Stratora and DJN Event Productions. Mail reaches me at nick@vnick.io.