Datacentre Tiki Tour
Got back last night from an extensive Now NZ Datacentre Tiki Tour. We had a flight booked to Welligton on Tuesday afternoon, but the weather put a stop to that with the most amazing wind gusts. The flight got cancelled, I tried to get us on another flight but it was all sold out in minutes and anyway I don't know it would have flown because of how bad the weather was. So it was get-in-the-car-and-drive time, which is what we did. Four and a half hours later we were in Wellington at our Wellingon Exchange. Which is of course the building I have known and "loved" as "The NIL" which is where I did heaps and heaps of work for Prophecy on Spark's Mobile network. The NOW Rack is on a different floor than the NIL, of course, but it was still a blast to realise they were one and the same building.
Then we zoomed over to the Lampton Quay datacentre, doing a cutover there from a big 7750 to a smaller 7210. I'd typoed an IP Address on an Interface, so that took two minutes longer than planned while we fixed that. Then it was out to the airport to the hotel with our 7750 in tow, all packed up ready for our 6:15am flight on Wednesday morning. We caught that no worries, no cancellations, though we did have to pay $80 extra for the weight of the 7750. Should have taken out the power supplies.
Auckland was just a whirlwind. We landed and went to Mt Eden, had breakfast at Circus Circus before heading back into the DC (after having met up with Levi). Then from there we went to Albany to get our new credientials and install our 7750 we'd plucked from Wellington. That took ~3 hours (bumped into Simon Allard walking the DC halls). Then to Glenfield, then to Mayoral Drive (where we said goodbye to Levi) then down to 220Q Datacentre. Then back to Mt Eden to try and fix a 100G handover that wasn't working, but no joy. We then zipped into De Post for a burger before heading out to the airport with ~30 minutes to spare before getting on the plane back to Napier.
It was a super flat out day, we didn't even have lunch because we were so busy and really, there's nowhere to eat in a datacentre. We really didn't have the time. But we got everything done. Phew!
Tim