'Great teamwork made
the project a success'
Well worth the effort
Business as usual
a town about 85 kilometres (53 miles)
away. The current Best data centre is
being refurbished with similar capac-
ity and technology specifications to
Croydon, while a further site is also being
built in Best. When the current site is
refurbished, the servers at the Zeist loca-
tion will make the migration to Best and
the Zeist site will be closed down.
Even though Dodds has spent his entire
career in IT, the London data centre
project has really challenged him. Tve
been involved in many different projects,'
he says, 'but this is the most demanding
and complex - in terms of variety and the
sheer number of things that we've had to
cover.' Although he refers to it as a 'real
roller-coaster ride,' he also freely admits
that it was well worth it. He credits great
teamwork as one of the things that
has made the project a success. 'Going
through the good and the bad together
really builds a strong relationship. You
lean on each other a lot and that's what
gets you through.'
Dodds does not expect that the migra
tion will cause any problems. In fact,
outside of his team, he hopes no one will
notice anything at all. This 'invisibility',
as Dodds refers to it, can sometimes be
a problem for the IT Infrastructure team.
'People are aware of us usually only when
things go wrong,' he says. 'We pride
ourselves on the fact that we are invisible,
but then people wonder what we do.
They are often not aware of the massive
infrastructure and ongoing maintenance
behind their sereens and keyboards.'
It's an infrastructure that, at Croydon, will
be given a new lease on life. If all goes
as planned, projects requiring significant
computing and data storage capacity,
like structured credit, correlation trad
ing, equity derivatives and the Financial
Systems Project (FSP) will be able to
continue as if nothing has happened.
However, as Dodds points out, the
Thames data site 'has reached its limit.
If we don't move to Croydon, we will very
shortly no longer be able to provide the
services we need to. That would limit
our trading and our business.' Thanks to
the hard work by Dodds and his team,
that is not going to happen, and Rl can
continue 'business as usual.'
Issue 13 February 2007 j The Word 21
