Later today (April 10th), Jason brought boys, Uncle Paul and me to see the data center of the company that he works in. I was surprised because it is so close to our house! I don't know that there are a professional data center just around our house! This data center trip was really special to me since I am kinda like an "IT guy", and I have my own website as well, so I can learn a lot more thing about servers and internet by visiting a real data center, and there is a person giving us a tour, too. (Jason's co-worker) The data center we were visiting today was held by a web solution company called redIT, this data center was not like Google's, it is not as big and this one have many clients (companies) renting and using the same data center at one time. When we first arrived there, we couldn't even find where it is, there are no any signs or directions, I guess it's because they don't really want people to know where they are (as one of their data center protection). And people are unable to look in from the windows as well.
Data Center (Image from Google; this is not the one we went.)
(Sorry I don't have any photos since photography was prohibited)
Outside area
After we actually goes into the door, the first thing we had to do was to check in. Since this is a very important place to many big companies, we have to use our passport as our ID to check in. Jason's co-worker told us that the check-in windows is actually bulletproof, and all the walls around us are very thick, so the car will not be able to crush the data center by driving into it. I was really amazed how a not-so-big data center also have this many protection!
The real exciting thing is to go into the actual data center, which has lots of computer, lots of cables, lot of noise... Yeah, after Jason's co-worker opened the super-think data center door, we immediately heard lots of noise and felt the hot air coming toward us. There are lots of “cages” in the data center, each cage is for one client, and each cage has their own cold air tube, power supplies etc. They first took us to look around the data center and told us what is what, like the “UPS room”. UPS stands for Uninterruptible Power Supplies (well, or United Parcel Service, but not this one :D), the batteries in this room may provide power for few hours, until the engine-generator to be started working properly. And there is also a room that has many machines from internet service provider such as AT&T, I forgot what those machines are called, are they routers? Well, I do know that it is very important to the data center because it gives all the internet sources!
we then went to the place where all the servers are, since there are many different clients (companies) using this data center together, each servers looks different. Some of the are very massy, all the cables are tied together, and… just looks very unprofessional. But the servers of Jason’s company do looks good! Since their server is only for internal use, there are not too many of them. They said that the servers in the cage next to ours is belong to a internet radio streaming service company, and there are total 76 Petabyte in those servers. CRAZY!
Jason’s co-worker told us everything basic about their servers, where the power supplies are, where the hard disk are, where the internet cable are, and of course he also told us how they work. I really learned a lot, I was surprised that there are so many “redundancy” hard drives! For the same data, there are at least 4 backup drives (redundancy), it was just unbelievable. Maybe I should really find a good web-hosting company to host my website, a free-hosting service just … not as good.
Well anyway, this data center tour was really cool! Now I really hope to visit GOOGLE DATA CENTER and see how MORE CRAZY Google can be!! XDDDD
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