Continental Airlines moves into bomb shelter

Computerworld - Continental Airlines Inc. last week ran its first full-blown test of a new disaster recovery facility that it opened earlier this year in an former bomb shelter built by an eccentric Chinese oil baron.

The Houston-based airline decided to improve its business continuity and disaster recovery facilities last October after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, said John Stelly, managing director of technology. At that time, the company's off-site facility was located just 20 miles north of Houston and ran on the same power and telecommunications grid as the city, he said.

In March, Continental chose a bomb shelter run by Westlin Corp. in Montgomery, Texas. The shelter, which is about 50 miles north of Houston, was originally designed in the 1980s to support up to 700 people for months. The facility extends 50 feet below ground and is not only farther from downtown Houston but is also served by a different power company and is on a different power grid, Stelly said.

Continental signed the lease by May 15 and had completed some retrofitting by July 1. While the airline had done some testing since July, the first full-scale operational test, which featured Continental running its entire organization for one shift from the facility, took place on Oct. 3, Stelly said.

The facility takes up about 2,000 sq. ft. of the 40,000-sq.-ft. underground bunker, which is where servers and other equipment are housed, Stelly said. The facility's primary shortfall -- literally -- is that its ceilings are only about 10 feet high, so Continental dealt with that by using shorter racks and more square footage, he said.

Stelly is not sure to what extent Continental will make use of some of the bunker's more eccentric facilities, such as 1,000-pound concrete-filled blast doors, jail cells and gun ports.

The original builder of the bunker complex was Lei-chan Kung, a nephew of Madam Chiang Kai-shek, who moved to the U.S. in the 1970s, said David Herr, president of Westlin Corp. Kung started Westland Oil Development in Houston and in 1982 built the bomb shelter complex and ran his company from there. After having been bombed by the Japanese as a child in China, he decided he needed the bomb shelter – estimated to have cost $30 million to construct in 1982 dollars. The original complex housed seven bars, three hot tubs, two saunas, two steam rooms, a swimming pool, an exercise room and locker rooms, he said. "We're down to one bar and one swimming pool now," he said.

Westland Oil went bankrupt in the early 1990s and the property was split up into several parcels. Kung died in 1996 after having bought a new house, under which he built a bomb shelter, Herr said.

In addition to the bomb shelter, Continental leases 12,500 sq. ft. in a four-story building next door to the shelter that was built to the same standards and at the same time as the underground facility by the same designer. The building is made of reinforced concrete with bulletproof glass. Both facilities feature two generators with enough diesel fuel on-site to run for a couple of months, Stelly said.

Inside, the building is set up like any other Continental office, right down to the Continental logo and carpeting so employees will feel at home, Stelly said. There are 275 Intel-based Hewlett-Packard Co. DC7600 workstations with Philips Electronics NV 17-in. and 19-in. monitors on the desks, including some with dual monitors, he said.

Inside the bunker, an Avaya Inc. S8700 IP private branch exchange is set up to run the voice capability with a local survivable processor, which provides all the features if the connection to the main system is lost; a Hewlett-Packard storage-area network; and Intel-based HP servers that run the applications, which are primarily custom software that keep Continental's 375 planes flying, Stelly said.