ABOUT

My name is Graham Brown, and this site is a blog dedicated to the things that I care about and have a passion to share with others. You will find a whole plethora of topics here, from technology, to the great outdoors and running a lifestyle farm in New Zealand.

Originally hailing from North East Manchester, I jumped across the Pennines to Huddersfield, then ‘down South’ to Surrey and finally Hampshire, before I found myself where I truly belong – New Zealand!

I moved to Christchurch, New Zealand in December of 2012 and immediately fell in love with the landscape and amazing people who live there. Being close to the mountains was heaven for me as I am an avid climber, mountaineer and snowboarder; whilst in Huddersfield I joined the Holme Valley Mountain Rescue Team (hence the domain name and Twitter handle of ‘mountainrescuer’. Once in Christchurch I quickly joined the Alpine Cliff Rescue Team, part of the NZ LandSAR operation.

In October of 2014 I made the move up to the North Island and to Auckland ‘the city of sails’. In July of the following year I moved to a 13.5Ha property to become a part-time farmer.

Work wise I have been in technology since 2004, spending seven years working for an ISP in Manchester, two years at an award-winning Juniper Networks partner, three years at another ISP (and Juniper Networks partner) eventually becoming a Network Architect. I made the jump into a dedicated pre-sales role in 2015 joining NEC (New Zealand) looking after Juniper Networks, Palo Alto and NEC SDN, Server and Storage products. Even though the job title was ‘senior systems engineer’, the role was actually one of a consulting engineer as I had to deploy everything that I sold.

October 2017 saw me joining a small managed services company, Network Service Providers (NSP) where I looked after a plethora of platforms and vendors, in pre-sales, professional services AND support capacities. The vendors included Cisco, Extreme Networks, Fortinet, Juniper Networks, Palo Alto Networks and Ruckus. I left NSP in August of 2019 and moved to a role that would see me once again roll my sleeves up and work on some of the largest networks in New Zealand.

Presently I am a Senior Network and Security Consultant working for a large managed service provider and integrator in a professional services capacity. The bulk of my day to day work is comprised of Juniper Networks routing, security and switching as well as Palo Alto Networks security solutions. There is also a smattering of Cisco and Fortinet just to keep things interesting – a huge difference between my day job, and running the farm!

I am also a Juniper Network Ambassador and cover that in more detail on the disclaimer page.