[BBLISA] co-location

[Dean Anderson]

On Fri, 2 Apr 2004, John Orthoefer wrote:

> Dean Anderson wrote:
> 
> >That's it.  GTE housed national VOIP equipement and servers and some other
> >stuff until it was moved to Burlington.  GTE wasn't a customer/webhosting
> >colo, where customers brought servers in. That was in Burlington, and I
> >think, Cambridge before that.
> >
> >  
> >
> Nope customer hosting was always in Cambridge, 10 Molton Ave, then we 
> opened a "temporary" data center Fawsett (sp?) Street.  What a mess that 
> was... originaly the racks they gave operations for our equipement where 
> backed up to a wall.   And I kept saying "temporary DCs, never are"  I 
> kept wanting to build it out to spec.  And they kept saying nope we are 
> only doing this for 12-18 months.

Yeah, "temporary DC" should be on a list of oxymorons...

> We had a datacenter in Burlington but it was Operations Only no customer 
> hosting was done out of there. 

Ahh. I never had much contact with that group. I knew a few people who
worked in it at some point, but that was about it.  I mostly only went to
Burlington for meetings with the VOIP ops people, and
management/progress/lawyer meetings--at one point they were going to name
me (and about 20 others) on a patent application for voip provisioning
system. But then the list was whittled down. But I also did work in the
VPN part of the datacenter next to the burlington NOC, and I setup some
systems in the VPN part of the NOC.  In contrast, John Brunelle started
with a datacenter in Waltham, which he moved to Burlington.  John pretty
much had everything under control by time the datacenter moved, so
engineering didn't have that much to do with it.

> I don't think Woburn ever housed Customer Hosting either.  But I might
> be wrong about that.

I've seen a nice "show datacenter" in Woburn complete with strategically
located clear floor tiles to show off nifty technical-looking cable trays
under the floor.  I think they show it on the customer "noc tour".  I
don't know what's actually in there. Probably _not_ any customer systems, 
though. 

> >But a lot of Genuity critical equipment was in Waltham for a long time
> >before it was moved to Burlington, just before it was moved again to
> >Woburn.  The VOIP datacenter was on the second floor, west. There was
> >another datacenter for the VPN group below that, (I did some work for the
> >VPN group, too, but that datacenter was purely engineering. Everything
> >moved to Burlington as soon as it worked)  There were several datacenters
> >in the north and east sides that belonged to Verizon. I don't know if they 
> >were production or not. Superpages was in one. I don't know what was in 
> >the rest.
> 
> As far as I know Superpages was always hosted out of Dallas.  GTE had a 
> building next to a DFW runway.   It was  acase of you could see your 
> plane from the building and you had to go about 2-3 miles out of your 
> way to get to the terminals to get your plane.

I didn't work for that group, either, so I don't really know what they
did. I just know that there were lots of superpages paraphenalia in one
part of the building that was on the way to the cafeteria.  And I know
also that there was a DC in that part of the building, from walking by it.  
I don't know if was production or engineering, or some other group that
just happened to have a lot of Superpages paraphenalia...  It was a big 
place. Probably several thousand people worked in the facility.

		--Dean