I Was There -  Chris Chiles & CDC

Another reminiscence Chris Chiles has shows what one decision can have on the whole life on many.    CDC in Mooons Moat Redditch become the focal point of a lot of ISTEL careers.   But what of the CDC in Solihull?

The creation of the Computer Data Centre (CDC) in Redditch as the centre of excellence for both Data Processing & Telecomms which BL Systems enabled ISTEL to capitalise on to grow it's business  but that happened almost by chance.

A CDC was central to ISTEL's plans to consolidate the computing resources of the BL group.

We had a very tight timescale to complete what was (at that time) the largest & most complex ever Systems project ever undertaken within BL, involving over 500 Data Processing staff in multiple locations (which was eventually completed in c.18 months, within budget & provided significant savings to BL). The site we had chosen for this was just across the road from the NEC and Birmingham Airport. Plans were well advanced a c.30m high microwave tower to be able to provide high speed telecomms links to all the key BL manufacturing sites in Birmingham, , Solihull, Coventry & Oxford to the CDC, as BT in those days could only supply 64kb lines (& those were on 2 year+ delivery). 

However, Solihull Council wouldn't allow this, due (I believe) to the proximity to Birmingham airport, but Redditch Council were happy to allow the tower at Moons Moat, so we selected that site as being reasonably 'central' between the key manufacturing locations & within line of site (using the tower + chimneys at the plants & the telecom tower over the Cotswolds), an ideal 'bare site' to construct a major new Data Centre & a supportive local Council.

This was the only way we could provide high enough capacity telecomms links (pre internet & broadband networks) to enable us to create a large central computer processing & data storage hub, running 24 hrs a day with the latest high speed computers (what today would be called a Data Centre & Cloud Storage) consolidating Computer Power, Storage & Network Resources for (almost) the whole of the then BL companies & to be used remotely by all the BL manufacturing sites.

This not only saved significant amounts of money, staff & resources for BL, but also provided a centre of excellence for both Data Processing & Telecomms which BL Systems.

So second choice CDC Redditch was built, many staff move to the New Town and ISTEL became one of Redditch's largest private sector employers