Day 60

Had a welcome sleep in this morning – woke up at 8am.  Ate breakfast at the hotel before heading back to Volvo IT again to meet with Kjell.  Got a tour of their two data centers (or big server rooms) in Gothenburg and also saw a third site where all the backups are located.

Getting to the first one was the most interesting, and most confusing.  From the office building that Kjell sits in we took a few flights of stairs down, then went through about 4 or 5 different doors before we reached the ‘tunnel’. 

It was like something out of an Indiana Jones movie – the early ones, not that crappy recent one!

I found out later that the tunnel system ran under the road and through a mountain to where the actual data center was.  The place itself was what you would expect – big rooms filled with lots of server racks.  We saw mainframes, windows servers, storage, comms, all the geeky stuff that makes up a server room.  Although it was impressive it was kind of what I expected it to be.  It’s almost a ‘seen one, seen them all’ type of situation.  Still it was good to see the facilities.

The second site was about 8kms away.  This one looked like an army bunker from the outside – no big signs saying “Volvo IT Data Center”, just a security fence requiring an access card, a sloping driveway and a grey door.  Once we swiped ourselves in through the first door Kjell pressed the intercom button for the security guard.  A voice came through the speaker telling us to look into the security camera and state our name and company.  Apparently we passed because he let us in.  Other than that bit of excitement the facilities were much the same as the last place.  I did actually get to see some of ASSA ABLOY’s actual servers which was cool, in a nerdy kind of way.  I’ve connected to these servers remotely many times, but now I’ve actually seen that they really do exist.

Kjell took me to lunch at a local kebab place – I had a Kebab Tallrik (or ‘plate’) which was not bad, but not as good as the place in Landskrona.  He was kind enough to drop me at the train station after lunch.  Killed some time looking round a big shopping center across the street from the station, but my backpack was heavy and annoying so ended up going back to the station to wait.

Three hours later and I was back home in Landskrona.  Stir fried beef with capsicum and a sesame and soy sauce for dinner.  One more day before the long (and my last) weekend…