Analysis: Boeing IT not all shook up by quake

by Mark Hall

March 7, 2001 —

SEATTLE -- I had just finished shaking hands yesterday with Christopher Kent, the vice president for computing and network operations at The Boeing Co., when the ground began to tremble with the jerking and rolling that's all too familiar to anyone who has ever experienced an earthquake.

As the 6.8-magnitude temblor that struck the Seattle area persisted, Kent and I squeezed into a door frame in the lobby of a Boeing building along with a dozen other nervous souls. From our vantage point, we could see another building across a quadrangle bounce on its foundation. Above it, a black plume of smoke began rising.

Someone in our crowd quickly called attention to the smoke. But Kent, in a calm voice and with a satisfied expression on his face, said it wasn't anything to worry about. "That's the diesel generator kicking in," he explained.

Earthquakes and other types of disasters are something that Kent never really expected Boeing to be hit with. But he has always prepared the Seattle-based company's IT operations for them. And as he looked out at the exhaust from the diesel generator, he knew that at least one phase of the planning was paying dividends: It turned out that the building we were watching pitch and roll houses one of Boeing's critical data centers.

With more than 400 offices around the world, Boeing's data centers can't go off-line -- ever. That's why backup power is only the first step in preparing the company for the unexpected as Kent leads an ongoing server consolidation effort. Boeing is combining 12 data centers in the Puget Sound region into just two facilities.

After being herded out into the parking lot by Boeing security personnel, Kent was quickly approached by one of his emergency team managers. The worker took Kent aside for a few minutes and gave him a report on the status of the company's IT operations.

What Kent heard was what he had expected to hear. IT staffers had all been accounted for, he said. Boeing's uninterruptible power supplies had kicked in along with the diesel generator. The company's network was up, and links between Seattle and a mainframe data center in St. Louis were live. The 400 Microsoft Exchange servers used to process e-mail for 162,000 end users were unaffected.

That doesn't mean Boeing's systems escaped the earthquake unscathed. Computers in one of the company's office buildings suffered severe damage when fire-suppressant sprinkler systems turned on during the 40-second quake. That building was later deemed unusable and was due to be torn down.

But from an IT operations standpoint, everything was going according to plan on Wednesday -- so much so that Kent felt comfortable enough to continue briefing a couple of journalists about the company's IT setup instead of taking an active role in dealing with the aftermath of the earthquake. Kent explained that it was important for managers such as himself to let the emergency team members do their work.

By the ttime the interview was over, Boeing had released its employees to go home early for the day and the roads surrounding its facilities were clogged with traffic. But the parking lot outside the company's data center remained full. The rest of the region might have been rattled by the quake, but Kent's team wasn't shook up at all.

Computerworld