Photos from HP's Houston Command Center (NOCC) while I worked there 2003-2006. The Command Center was located on the [former] Compaq Campus in Northwest Houston along Route 249 just outside the beltway. While technically outside the city limits, it was still in Harris County so still considered as part of Houston by the Post Office. The building was huge housing 15,000 servers, many of them large mainframes. The Command Center on the second floor had about 10 rows of workstations plus video screens in front so supervisors and leads could monitor the status. |
| 1. The rows were arranged like an auditorium, getting higher as you went torwards the back. The usage corresponded to the OSI Layers; the front row dedicated to bandwidth and physical circuits, then network routing, then systems, finally applications, services, backups, towards the back rows. I switched between networks (front rows), and systems support (OpenVMS, HP-UX, True64 Unix, SCO Unix, and ultrix) which were in the middle. |
| 2. View from the Handoff Conference Room. Each shift met 15 minutes before start in this room to discuss global issues, problems being handed off, etc. There were about 50 people/shift with four separate shifts. Each shift worked 12 hours/day; four days one week then three days on alternate weeks (average of 42 hours/week) which provided 7x24 coverage. We also swapped weekends vs mid-week shifts, swapping back-and-forth every few months so no one shift got stuck with weekends all the time. |
| 3. View of the building from the parking lot. |
| 4. The building consumed so much power we had our own electrical substation. |
| 5. New Years Eve Cellebrations in the NOCC. |
| 6. Thanksgiving Dinner (pot luck). We had quite a feast. |
| 7. My supervisor, "Okie" (yes, that was his name). A real Texan. |
| 8. Horsing around in the front row. |
| 9. The guys behind me supported Windows on both the HP and Compaq network. |
| 10. Just to prove that not everything is bigger in Texas. On a trip home to New England I filled a soft-sided cooler with the huge oversized lobsters purchased from a lobster supply in New Hampshire. Then brought them down to the NOCC one evening as "New England Crawfish". We had quite the feast. (Two of the big lobsters plus a second cooler with 20 or so regular sized ones.) |