Beast for Halifax
With the help of some very clever people in BT, I headed up the design, development and IT Project management for an innovative solution for Halifax that lead to competing against the national lottery for an award for technical innovation within customer services.
BT were supplying engineering services to Halifax data centre in Copley and Pudsey as part of their overall multi million annual contract. They had a team of engineers dedicated to managing their eCommerce data centre. Specifically, their task was to manage the configurations of Local Directors, Switches, Heartbeat Routers and Servers, switching elements on and off in order for maintenance of software releases and hardware repairs across hot-swappable share loading disaster recovery locations. The scope was huge encompassing if.com, building society services, estate agency - in fact all their business activity. The release task for instance of updating if.com web site required telnet commands to be constructed to the various element, validated and them manually run and a set of tests done to ensure they were correctly allocated on one branch. Then this reversed tested etc to bring back that branch and then the other branch shut down and the whole piece repeated. Preparation for this took two weeks, implementation 48 hrs for a team of 20 odd engineers.
My solution used MS Sequel server to store a representation of the data centre, ASP to present it as a map to users and an interface to select elements for change and display current status and results, DLL's to run background logic which in turn drom java telnet wrapper.
The end result: Via Beast, planning took 1 man 24 hrs, and to apply it to the devices, seven seconds end to end.
Halifax stated and example of the benefits. For every second if.com was down, £7k was lost in trading profit.
An amazing project, I understand still not repeated.
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