From Hyderabad with love

My current position means that I am "interacting" with IT people in India. I put interacting in quotes, because any interacting occurs via email, which doesn't much have "inter" in the "acting."

Anyway, I thought that it might be interesting to detail the path that a file that I received last week traveled from India to me.

This particular file was a 750 MB file that installs Microsoft Outlook 2007. My job was to get it from India and test it to see if it worked as desired.

The file started in Hyderabad, India. A lovely little place.

View Larger Map

Some bloke in Hyderabad copied it to a server in Preston, England:

View Larger Map

This is where I found the file. Since there is a bandwidth issue with the server in England, I had to wait until after 5pm UK time to copy the file down. But then I could copy to my little heart's content. It took somewhere over two and a half hours to copy down the file - really not too bad, considering.

Once I had the file on my computer, I copied it to a file server 50 feet away. From there I copied it to a laptop sitting on my desk. I suppose that I could have copied it directly between my two machines but, alas, I was dividing my attention between this task and several others and didn't consider this option.

Once I had the file on the laptop, I connected this computer into the client's network with a VPN connection. Then I copied it to a secret location in Arizona.

View Larger Map

OK, so it wasn't really secret; I just don't want to tell. On the server in Arizona I did a little processing of the file to ready it for installation. Then I copied it to a server in Indiana.

View Larger Map

Get it? India to Indiana? Cool, huh?

Anyway, after a while the server in Indiana was all done with whatever the heck it was doing up there with the file (it's complicated; suffice to say that it was processing) and it was ready to go. This took about 45 minutes. So I told the server in Arizona to take the file in Indiana and send it to my test machine in Arizona, so I could see if the package worked. Incidentally, I think I know what town the server and the test machine are located in. Are they in the same building, in the same block, in the same zip code? No idea.

Sending the file down from Indiana to Arizona took about three hours. And then it was ready to test. I issued the command to install the file, and off it went. And it worked!

This entire process took a good bit of two work days. Fun, eh? Ain't modern technology amazing?

So what was it that traveled from India to Arizona? Nothing physical; the actual physical "things" that traveled from one place to another alternated between light (over fiber optic cable) and electrons (over copper wire). Who knows, there might even have been some wireless or semaphore connections in there, for all I know. But the changing media means that only information flowed over all that distance. So no physical thing came from India to Arizona, only information.

Now imagine similar transactions occurring thousands of times a day, all over the world. Quite stunning to think about.