I have been travelling through Central and Eastern Europe. I had the opportunity to speak at the IDC Storage Roadshow in Zagreb. There were well over 200 people in attendance, which shows the growing importance of storage in the emerging econommies of CEE. I was hosted by Ante Baric, Boris Maravic, and Kresimir Bradic, of Computech, our partner in Croatia. Computech won the HDS award for Best Service Partner of the year in CEE last year and are well on their way to another successful year.
At the end of the week, I stopped in Vienna, to meet with customers and partners. Mr Schauerhuber, General Manager of First Data International, was kind enough to invite me for a tour of his data center in the heart of Vienna, and later to his control center located in another part of the city. The data center was in an underground, lights out, vault. This site was processing all the credit card and ATM transactions in Austria and it was humming away in total darkness. Everything was connected to a duplicate data center in another location. What struck me was how little space is required with todays storage and server technologies. 80% of the space and power was taken up by networking equipment. Later, I was given a tour of the operations center, where they monitor the networks and flag unusual transactions. I also had an interesting time talking to Mr Schauerhuber about the changing role of IT.
On Saturday, my wife and I toured the center of Vienna which is known as District 1, and we could not resist the urge to do some shopping. At the end of the afternoon, my wife decided to go back to a shop where we had bought some small items on our credit card earlier in the day. She had seen an item there that she now decided we could not live without. When she went to pay with our credit card, there was a long delay and then she was asked to speak to someone on the phone. The person on the phone politely asked her some questions to verify who she was, then authorized the store to approve the purchase.
I realized that we were experiencing First Data in action! I guess it is unusual if two transactions are done at the same store in the space of a few hours, and the second transaction is much larger than the first. I was so excited to see this connection between my wife’s transaction and the operations center that I had just visited the day before, I wasn’t even concerned about the cost of my wife’s purchase(s).
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