Next weekend

Next weekend was Originally Posted on February 14, 2004 by lavarock

President’s Day Weekend. Most people remember it as a long weekend and a time to get away. A couple of Hawaii hotels I know are booked solid with people who needed a mini-vacation in the middle of a cold winter.

Back in Atlanta, many people remember President’s Day Weekend as the weekend of the big Blizzard a few years back. In reality, that weekend was about the beginning of a year’s work for myself and a few hundred of my closest co-workers

I was working for Hewlett Packard in Atlanta and we had computer rooms and buildings spread around town. We were in the process of building a new 21 story building at the top end of the Perimeter in Atlanta. It is a beautiful and functional building. Ir would be a great home, but first we had to move in.

As with any large buildings, there are longterm and shortterm problems which slow down the move. What I want to relate though is the 1 year timer countdown we had.

We had chosen this particular President’s Day weekend to consolidate our computer rooms into the new building. We planned for a year and literally moved Hewlett Packard’s Americas business that particular weekend. Unless you are involved with a project this large, you cannot fully comprehend it.

We performed a “flash cut” which is best described as a forced move with little chance of turning back. During any large project it is easy to hit a problem and make the decision to stop, discuss and make the decision to undo your changes and wait for another try. This is NOT a flash cut! We needed to coordinate so many people and things that the cost of backing out would have been prohibitive!

To understand, our new computer room was the size of a football field. We were moving well over 100 mainframes (each maniframe could support hundreds of users each) and hundreds of servers (a server is a very large version of a person computer).

We planned for a year. We worried for a year. We dreaded for a year. After the blizzard we realized that we needed to ensure that we could get through, rain (snow) or shine. We would be haing hundreds of moving van loads delivered, every electrical outlet needed to work (and some computers used multiple ones). We had to train many volunteers to help us remove and reinstall the systems. There were too many tasks to perform with just our I.T. staff. In some cases we enlisted end users to work on their own computers. Since many of them had never actually seen their own system it was a treat. These systems are always hidden away from prying eyes in a cold computer room where customers rarely are allowed to visit.

At the time, we also were installing 2 telephone switches the size of small town phone companies. Few companies in Atlanta had as many phone and data connections as we did. You home phone number might be 404-222-5555. We owned 2 such 404-222 exchanges! Thus we could have used up to 20,000 telephone numbers in teh same building (not that we needed that mamy)

Anyway, without boring you with all the techie details, we moved all the systems and some of the people that President’s Day Weekend. Only 1 system failed to boot up and was repaired and replaced.

We even filmed a time-lapse video of the room filling up. Imagine a room the size of a football field being assembled in one lone weekend. And, we finished the move a day earlier than expected, to everyone’s surprise! We were so proud that we had planned the event so well as to not have to back out of the move.

We had checked and rechecked every task and practiced them multiple time. Truely amazing!

Perhaps next weekend, I’ll move my own computer across the room, just as a tribute to days gone by.