Transatlantic Cable: is Silicon Valley ready for Y2K?

Like the sword of Damocles, the millennium is hanging over the heads of every IT manager in the world. But it's probably more critical for many in the US (and in particular Silicon Valley), as it is home to some of the busiest Web sites and biggest ecommerce companies in the world.

The Web is a core part of these companies' business. Even a few minutes of downtime for the likes of Looksmart and eBay could cost millions of dollars.

Not surprisingly, all of these have risen to the challenge (especially given the fact that they could all be sued into oblivion if they do have any problems), and they've all spent large amounts of cash checking and rechecking their systems. The US Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act requires that all companies give information on the readiness of themselves and their products for the millennium. Therefore, you'll see plenty of Web sites with phrases like, "We have diligently taken steps to implement a smooth transition and to ensure the continued availability of (whatever the company does) through and after January 1, 2000."

Needless to say, they all contain a get-out clause to say that they can't predict everything. And, as a result, many companies are planning to have engineers on call to deal with any problems as they arise.

For instance, GlobalCenter, a high-profile hosting service based in Sunnyvale in the heart of Silicon Valley, is also home to the servers of loads of high profile Web sites, such as www.toysrus.com, www.redhat.com and www.netscape.com. The company claims that its systems are all Y2K compliant, but it's not taking any chances. "The infrastructure that GlobalCenter has is fairly new and has been architected to be compliant, so we aren't anticipating any problems with that," said the wonderfully-named Secret Fenton of GlobalCenter. "We will be having the usual number of support staff on site, and our TAMs (Technical Account Managers - the people who deal directly with the customers) will all be on call so they can quickly come into our facility if they are having problems."

However, some companies are convinced they won't have any problems and aren't planning to have staff standing by their servers. "We have contracted an outside consulting firm to perform Y2K validation, including testing of all of our production systems," said Jon Phillips, MIS manager at the search engine company LookSmart, whose servers are also located in GlobalCenter. He's so confident that his systems will carry on working that he won't have anybody on site: instead he will have "maybe an additional three on-call engineers - however no actual person will be on-site unless they see problems."

Phillips also thinks that he will have advanced warning of any potential problems by keeping an eye on how LookSmart's Australian branch performs as the date changes: "Right now, my counterparts in Oz are not expecting any problems. However, since they will see the first day of the year 2000, they can see what is happening in Asia and in Australia. I have very good lines of communication with them, so they have promised to keep me updated on what they see at midnight and throughout the day."

EBay is also playing it cool, and claims that its systems won't fall over, despite a recent series of outages caused by server failures that attracted widespread media attention. Russell Brady, international PR manager at eBay, said: "Our systems were installed and created after Y2K became a technology issue. We continue to review our systems for Y2K preparedness. EBay is already a 24 hour-a-day engineering operation and we will have people available as the big day hits."

Meanwhile, router company Cisco will be treating it just like "any other work day", according to PR person John Earnhardt. The company isn't expecting a sudden glut of calls as the date changes and won't be allocating any extra resources to technical support over the days leading up to and following the date change. "We're confident in our technology and will have people available, but we aren't expecting the number of calls to go up."

But the Y2K bug has already claimed one victim: a fire station in Montreal was damaged by fire when an unattended chip fryer caught light. The fireman was cooking the chips in the fire station's kitchen and when the alarm for a call went off, he went off to fight the fire in a nearby building. The fryer should have automatically shut down (so the firefighters don't have to waste time turning things off), but the system that was supposed to shut the fryer off had been disabled because the city was testing its own systems for Y2K compliance. This lead to a fire that caused over half a million dollars (Cdn) worth of damages (see http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/991117/3159499.html ). Only time will tell whether the millennium will result in us all out of the frying pan, and into the fire...