What is your data center like?

We have a brand new station that we just completed [in 2005] and we have a full-on data center with raised floors and everything you would have anywhere else in the world. We have about 30 servers. We also have what we call the RF [radio frequency] building, which is about a kilometer away from the main station, and we have a backup emergency data center out there where we keep extra file servers and a SAN. That's where the satellite dishes are. If anything happens to the primary data center we can switch our operations out to there.

Do you work with an IT counterpart back in the States?

There's a whole team I can call on back in Denver and we depend on them quite a bit. If we have problems and we can't solve them down here we rely on our Denver staff to provide trouble shooting.

What's a little known fact about life at the South Pole Station?

People would be surprised to know how well we eat down here. We have a little greenhouse. We have enough greenhouse production with hydroponics to get us a salad every couple of days.

Is it tough to hire staff to work there?

We usually have a high number of applicants -- it took me four years of applying before I was hired. But there are some times when we just don't have enough candidates. It fluctuates with the state of the economy. Right now I'm in a huge competition for satellite communications guys with contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those guys are able to pay so much more than we can. Of course the advantage down here is that nobody is shooting at you.

What technical challenges do you face?

Our biggest challenge is bandwidth. We only have it only 12 hours a day at anywhere from T-1 (1.54 Mbit/sec) to 3 Mbit/sec speeds. We also have a transponder that we can use to send 60 Mbit/sec unidirectional from the pole to the real world. We use that to upload scientific data. Our record was 94Gbytes out in one day.

We have three different satellites we use to provide our Internet. All of those are pretty ancient. We have a weather satellite, an old maritime communications satellite and an old NASA satellite, the first one that was launched back in 1981. The others were launched in 1976 or 1977.

Basically we're scavenging whatever we can find and we can only see each satellite for 3 to 4 hours a day. Other than that we're almost a typical network. We use Cisco gear, we've got land lines to all of the bedrooms, we've got fiber optic distributed throughout the building so if fiber to the desktop ever becomes a reality the building is prewired for that. So we are trying to be as future proof as possible.

What is the most interesting project you've worked on lately?

In the past year we put up a really cool system where we're using the Iridium satellite network. We have 12 modems mulitiplexed together and have a total of 28.8K connectivity 24 x 7. Nobody thought it would work. Nobody ever thought we would have 24 x 7 connectivity at the South Pole. Now that's our last resort. When our broadband satellites are down we switch to the Iridium system automatically.

What happens if the satellite link goes down on your end? Do you draw straws to see who goes out to the RF building to wiggle the antenna?

Everyone here has had the experience of walking out to the remote data center in -100 degree temperatures when it's pitch black outside. That's part of the adventure of coming down here -- you can have these extreme situations that you're faced with. If you can handle swapping a router out at -100 degrees here then you can handle it anywhere.