ATC Ribbon Cutting

In my previous post I had mentioned how extremely proud I was of the Technology teams here at AOL in delivering a truly state of the art Data Center facility with some incredible ground breaking technology.  As I mentioned the facility was actually in production use faster than we could get the ribbon cutting ceremony scheduled.  I thought I would share a small slice of the pictures of the internal Ribbon Cutting Event.

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Alex Gounares, former fellow Microsoft alum and AOL CTO and I presided over the celebration.   In this photo, Alex and I talk over some of the technologies used in our cloud with one our cloud engineers.  As the facility is based upon pre-racked technologies and modular facility and network build components it allows for significant cost and capital optimization. this allows us to build only when demand and growth dictates the need. All machines in the background are live and have been live for a few weeks.

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After receiving two very large scissors which were remarkably sharp and precise for their size we were ready to go.   A few short words about the phenomenal job our teams performed and it was time for some ribbon to kiss raised floor.

 

 

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At the end of the day the real reason why this project was such a success really breaks down to the team responsible for this incredible win.   An effort like this took incredibly smart people from different organizations working together to make this a reality.    The achievement is even more impressive in my mind when you think about the fact that in many cases our 90 day to live timeframe included design and execution on the go!   My guess is our next one may be significantly faster without all that design time. The true heroes of ATC are below!

 

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(Special thanks goes out to Krysta Scharlach for the permission and use of her pictures in this post)