Laurence Andrews

IBM Adventures

Had an interesting day today… Network design work has one major downside: I don’t get out much. There I was, slaving away, when suddenly a P1 appeared! I don’t usually do support but when there is nobody in the whole of London from Atos available guess who the buck falls to…. Anyway, I was secretly excited because I’ve never been to this facility before and I’m all up for having a look at some kit to keep me sane.

So I’m told to truck up to the IBM building on the South Bank. I wait around for 20 mins. Get a call, apparently there is more than one IBM building on the South Bank. Whoops.

Eventually I get to IBM Sampsun house. This place is big, like seriously big, four floors of data halls. According to the website it operates as a contingency planning site for banks, offing them dealing room floor space, meeting rooms and most importantly lots of hall space. All pretty clever really.

In the end I couldn’t fix the P1, although I did identify that despite BT saying the line was working and ‘they had tested it’ it most definitely wasn’t working. Although I guess they weren’t technically wrong since one strand of fibre worked, just not the other….

london  work