2001

AOL Internet Services

The group I joined at AOL was called Internet Services provided, well just that, internet services to other groups and brands within AOL. Internet Services was largely a bunch of technical staff of system administrators, database administrators, storage engineers and network engineers that set up and managed the computer systems for AOL websites.  In addition to AOL websites, AOL provided free hosting services to over a dozen non-profit organizations of which Internet Services supported. Part of my job as a technical project manager was to manage the non-profit projects.  With the closing of the AOL – Time Warner merger my main focus was on managing the migration of Time Warner systems and websites to AOL datacenters, more specifically the Warner part of Time Warner. Another project manager in our group, Scott, was designated to handle the Time part of Time Warner.  Scott was a really nice guy, several years younger than me, had joined AOL a couple years before and experienced the meteoric rise of AOL stock and had made a small fortune on his stock options. Mine were still worthless.

One of the first Time Warner divisions I worked with was Warner Music Group (WMG) which had over a hundred computer systems that ran the websites of the different music labels and dozens of websites for music artists.  Moving the computers and WMG websites took several months with WMG sending batches of computers to AOL which then would be installed in the AOL datacenter and once up and running, WMG would move websites to them. As project manager, I coordinated the migration, being the primary AOL contact for the WMG technical staff for the shipment of their servers to AOL. When the servers arrived, I then coordinated the efforts of the various AOL teams to have the servers installed.  This involved the datacenter team to physically receive the servers and install it into a rack in the datacenter, the network team to install routers, switches, and firewalls for the servers could reach the Internet, and then the system administrators in our Internet Services group to setup and configure the servers, and sometimes storage system and database administrators.  None of people on the other teams worked directly for me, some were not even in our Internet Services group. It was a real test of my project management skills to coordinate and schedule the work to be done since they all had other projects within AOL that they worked on. It helped that upper management had given a pretty high priority to the migration of Time Warner systems to AOL.  In the end it took several months to migrate the Warner Music Group’s systems which was about two hundred servers. Even after the migration was completed, over the next few years they continued to add new servers every month or so.

Datacenters