2002

AOL in Gainesville

Work was going well with my main focus on migrating more of the Time Warner computer systems to the AOL DTC and MTC datacenters. There also were the nonprofit organizations that we hosted that I managed which were always somewhat of a nuisance in that they were always wanting something for free, computers, network gear, or system administrator time.  With the AOL projects taking priority, the nonprofits took a back seat which they then pestered me even more. 

Midyear the latest AOL datacenter opened, the Gainesville Tech Center or GTC in Gainesville Virginia which I always found interesting since I grew up in Gainesville Florida. It had the same basic design as DTC and MTC but had more office space and the computer rooms could provide more power and thus a higher density of computer systems. I remember going to the DTC the first time and seeing rows and rows of computer racks with six or eight Sun Microsystems computers in each rack.  If you walked down the front of the row it would be nice and cool but if you walked down the back of the aisle it would be like 80 degrees.  This worked out fairly well for DTC as a Sun computer was eight or ten inches tall so that was all that would fit in a standard six-foot rack.  In 2000 the AOL service pretty much ran on Sun computers running SunOS, their custom version of the Unix operating system. This was great at the time for Sun systems were very reliable but on the downside Sun systems and SunOS were expensive. But technology was changing, and computer servers grew smaller and moving away from such vendor specific computers and operating systems. New servers by Dell, HP, Compaq used Intel processors and ran open-source Unix operating systems costing half of what an equivalent Sun server. Servers shrunk in size from eight or ten inches to what was known as the 1 U server. 1 U is 1.75 inches in height which was considered one rack unit thus the U.  Where you could have eight Sun servers in one rack, you could now have 40 1 U servers in a rack, well at least in theory. The problem was the heat the servers generated. Although the 1 U servers were smaller and thus produced less heat, 40 of them produced a lot more heat than a full rack of Sun servers. Air conditioning became a limiting factor and a datacenter only had so much cooling capacity. At DTC only about ten 1-U servers could be in a rack. MTC had increased cooling and could have like 15. The new GTC facility could have 20 1-U servers in a rack which was half of what a rack could physically hold. 

One of the first projects I had for GTC was for the Matix Online game based on the popular movie the Matrix. I managed the installation of over nine hundred 1-U IBM computers for the game. The IBM racks could hold 40 servers but because of the power/heat limitations at GTC, only 20 servers could be put in a rack. With the racks half full, they took up twice the floor space.

After reaching 34 million users in 2002, AOL users started to decline largely in part to cable TV companies offering broadband service and telephone companies offering DSL service. Time Warner had a broadband Internet service called Roadrunner and AOL had great plans to leverage the service. In the AOL Time Warner merger press release it said:

“We will accelerate the development of Time Warner’s cable broadband assets by bringing AOL’s hallmark ease-of-use to this platform. We expect America Online to help drive the growth of cable broadband audiences, and we will use our combined infrastructure and cross-promotional strengths to enhance the growth and development of both America Online and Time Warner brands around the world.”

But this never came to fruition. The main reason for using AOL was for its dial up capability which was not needed for broadband access that was always connected to the Internet.  It was like why pay for broadband service and then pay for AOL service on top of it.  With broadband you only needed a web browser, Netscape or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. AOL argued but the AOL client made the Internet easier to use, with your favorite things one click away. But with broadband people didn’t buy it, both figuratively and reality.  

IBS