Just been on a tour of HSBC building at Tankersley

Its just a great **** off computer & cooling system.

You IT monkeys would have been flabergasted at the scale of the place.

Its quite impressive.

 

i worked in that building when it was under constuction

 

Opened in early eighties

Cost 40million quid.

Quite amazing..you would never build a structure of such quality in this day and age. It would be in a flat pack wharehouse.

Own restaurant, squash court, 7 MW generators.

Handles all of HSBC / first direct transactions.

 

Many years ago I ran one of the Shifts of IBM Mainframe Ops there....

not a bad setup is it !!

 

Thats most of the HSBC worldwide transactions as well

I remember when HSBC took Midland Bank over and all the big wigs came over to show us how it was done....
They were amazed at the setup and how it was run and we started controlling all the HSBC stuff !!

 

They are just in the process of upgrading

to blade servers.

If they filled the old computer rooms with blades there is no way they could cool the place

Just put in 3 440kW cooling chillers for some expansion though they have plans to build a new data centre within 40km of Tankersley.

 

RE: They are just in the process of upgrading

They did have a contingency site over in Bootle as well, don't know if they still do.

I worked for Midland / HSBC for 13 years, at that site and Head Office in Sheffield. A good setup really, played plenty of squash and played for the Footie Team too !

 

Aye, bootle site is standby

They run the systems from there for four hours at the end of each shift pattern to check it all runs OK.

As you say its very impressive.

The tour lasted over 2 hours around mainly the engineering side / computer rooms / control bridge talk.

 

Bloody high tech show offs.

When I used to work for First Direct we used to transfer stuff to tankersley on 1/4 inch tapes. And that was as recently as 1998. I hope they are not still using them.

 

still quite a lot of tapes or cartridges.

 

RE: still quite a lot of tapes or cartridges.

just thinking, it might have been 1/2 inch tapes. You know the types that used to spin round on reels in bad old films. With flashing lights and beeping and stuff.

Except we didnt have any lights or sound effects. And you couldnt see them spin round because they were in slot loading drives. You couldnt beat high tech though. If the drive failed to load, you just snipped a bit off the end of the tape. Worked every time.

I will shut up.

 

Not too many of those buggers..

..I did work experience with BMBC at computer centre on westgate.

Did much the same for three weeks.

 

RE: still quite a lot of tapes or cartridges.

Aye I remember that

Also remember sending cartridges by taxi at 3am every morning when I worked at Asda in Leeds. Mind you - we had a contract witha particular taxi driver, once I asked how much he'd charge me to take me to Barnsley after a night out in Leeds and he said he'd do it for nowt on his nightly run!

 

RE: Not too many of those buggers..

When was that?

I worked there from about 1983 - 1986

 

I remember one night shift....

loaded all 8 of the big old bugger tape decks ready to run the backups, set the jobs running expecting to see em all spin. All of em just unloaded and stopped...day shift had got the wrong set of tapes out....we had to get the whole bloody lot out and run the backups.....
No chance of an early finish that night

 

1983/84ish..cant quite remember

 

RE: 1983/84ish..cant quite remember

I used to work mainly at Becketts (Direct Works dept) and Smithies - running the Honeywell minis overnight and weekends, but also did some at the main computer centre. Worked with a few who were on work experience

 

was bored as ****

used to rub my finger on the running tapes as they loaded. Operator got a bit "wound up" by my activities.ff
It was loads of fun printing off overdue library reminders and rates bills...:S

 

RE: was bored as ****

Were you work experience from school?

I used to hate having those there - though we did once get some 16 year old lass with hugh tits!

 

RE: was bored as ****

You weren't the lad who leaned on the emergency power off button, when I was showing you how to operate printer, and the whole system powered down were you?