Inside Xbox Live's Operations Center

Cold Dawg writes "[H] Console takes an exclusive behind the scenes look at the Xbox Live Command Center with Jason Coon, Operations Program Manager for Xbox Live. Steve Lynch says, 'The Xbox Live Operations Center or "XOC" (pronounced zock) is where all the action is. The large room is literally wall to wall workstations and LCD monitors. There are several monitors attached to the wall at the front of the room that display all kinds of system information. There were also a lot of media carousels at one end of the room, each capable of holding 150 games. From what we saw, there was easily enough storage capacity to hold over 3,000 games.'"

Re:Wow!

[Ryan Amos]

Maybe because datacenters and control rooms are utilitarian structures that all generally look alike? A control center is generally a row or 2 of PCs with a projector at the front displaying a nagios/EMC monitoring page purely to look busy (all real alerts are sent to pagers or blackberrys.) If you don't plan on showing it off to the public, I'm guessing it looks a lot like any other office (cubes and meeting rooms.)

A datacenter is almost always a large room full of black cabinets. Yawn, nothing to see there, the only variations are whether they use overhead cabling racks or raised floors. They can be impressive when inside of them, if only for the deafening sound of thousands of rack servers.