Alpharetta Wrap-Up

So the trip is over, and I made it home in one piece, though not fully without incident. On the morning of the 18th, we went to see where all the servers were housed, and it was actually really, really interesting just how much redundancy they build into places like this. They apparently haven't had the servers go 100% down since 1988 (I believe).

It works like this: there are power stations on both side of the two buildings that house these servers. One station feeds to one building and one feeds to the other, but in the event that a station goes down, the building who loses it will draw power from the other side. If they lose power altogether, there are huge batteries in the basements that will power the building for roughly 30 minutes until the main backup generators kick in. They will kick in in about 30-90 seconds, so 30 minutes is a lot of redundancy to begin with. There are thousands of gallons of diesel stored under these buildings, so these generators can run for a little over a week on generator power to allow time for the power to come back on. Pretty impressive, in my opinion.

I learned that with servers of this magnitude, the hard drives are not stored inside the machines, but they get their own rack. The servers link together for more power and speed and access the hard drives which can be individually removed and or replaced as needed, since there are multiple backups of everything. The floors that we walked on were not the base of the floor itself as vents pushed air up through the floor to cool these beasts and miles of cables also ran in the spaces under our feet.

The control center for these servers that show error messages and that sort of things looks like a NASA control room out of a space movie. Monitors are everywhere, and people just sit there and stare at them...waiting for something to happen.

Following the tour, we made our way to the airport, and got there is no time flat. This allowed plenty of time for us to wait in line at the ticket counter and then wait in line at the security check. I really have no qualms with the security thing. It doesn't annoy me or make me crazy. I don't find it invasive in the least, though they ended up sending both my carry on and personal item through twice because the machine "cut it off". Oh well.

The hop from Atlanta to Dallas was uneventful and almost early. It missed being early because the previous flight was leaving late. Hm... This was a harbinger of what was to come. Our flight to Tulsa was supposed to leave at 5:20 which would put us in at 6:24. That didn't happen. We checked the time and it was delayed thirty minutes. So we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And finally around 6:00, we started...BOARDING. That flight had left late from wherever it had come from so it was late getting in and once we were on board, we sort of figured out why. You see, I was coordinating with the Queen on when I was getting there so she could pick me up and we could do our weekly dinner with my parents and siblings. Well, as we were waiting on the plane even longer, we hear this little (paraphrased) announcement: "Ladies and genetlemen, sorry about the delay this evening. We're having a little problem with a liner in the rear baggage compartment, and it's giving us some trouble in shutting the door. We're moving some things around and got it closed, but our center of gravity is off, so we're not going to be able to take off until we get our numbers lined up. We'll let you know as soon as we have it taken care of so we can take off." Or something like that.

Anyway, about 6:25 or so, we finally backed out of the gate and took off. The flight was uneventful and smooth from there, and I think I spotted the Red River (the border between Texas and Oklahoma) from the plane's window. That was neat.

So I got back without any major problems and only one delay, and did see the family that evening. Not sure if I'll participate in the group that took me to Georgia the last couple years again, because it always causes considerable consternation among the Queen and Princesses. I've found that I can be a bit of a homebody after a time, and don't like to go that far away. The time in Alpharetta was ok. The fitness center had a good treadmill that I couldn't break and I ran every night, but that hardly substitutes for home.

It is good to be back.