What is a Data Center?

Oracle Academy Tech Chat

In this episode host Tyra Peirce speaks with Oracle development data center manager Ryan Lucas. Ryan tells Tyra about the key components of a data center, and what it takes to run a data center.

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Episode Transcript:

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:34:09

Unknown

Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps our next generation's workforce.

00:00:34:11 - 00:00:58:17

Unknown

I'm your host, Tara Crockett Pierce. In this episode, I speak with Oracle Data Center manager Ryan Lucas. Ryan breaks down the basics of data centers what they are, how they work, and why they're essential for empowering your favorite streaming services to securing business critical data. So far to securing business critical data. Data centers are the unseen force behind modern technology.

00:00:58:17 - 00:01:27:03

Unknown

Welcome, Ryan. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So go ahead and start off. Ryan, can you give me a little bit about your background and your role at Oracle? Yeah. So I first started working as a system administrator, for the Java group at Sun Microsystems back in 2002. My responsibilities included deploying and maintainingsystems, like Solaris, Linux, and even windows servers.

00:01:27:05 - 00:02:03:20

Unknown

And I would also troubleshoot network, software and hardware issues. Eventually my responsibilities included backing up important files like source code for the Java Development Kit or otherwise known as JDK. I've been at Oracle for 16 years. Yeah. So in my current role, I help manage labs that, are essentially on-premise data centers. They may not be as large as something you would see like an on OCI site.

00:02:03:22 - 00:02:33:11

Unknown

But the labs that I support, they when you're inside them, they look like data centers. And we, they basically are used to to test Oracle engineered systems. So my group we help provide local support for the engineers of Oracle Engineered Systems. We have systems that have been released to the public. And we have systems that have not been released to the public.

00:02:33:13 - 00:03:01:03

Unknown

And so what we are responsible for, you know, deploying, maintaining, keeping these servers running and helping create testing environments so that engineers can make sure that the engineered, that their hardware works as advertised. And then, sometimes even after hardware has been released, if a customer has some kind of concern, we may have to recreate their environment in our lab.

00:03:01:09 - 00:03:21:06

Unknown

Well, I call it lab, but it's a data center. And that way, we can try to discover if the customer's having a lot of times the customers having an issue because it's a customer error. So, you know, maybe the customer is trying to use our hardware in ways that we hadn't, you know, thought about or wasn't really designed for.

00:03:21:08 - 00:03:47:03

Unknown

But, yeah, eventually there will be some issues that we have to work through. And, and so it's it's very dynamic. So a typically like a, like an OCI production data center, you know, that is very structured. You know, all the cables are pristine a specific length. You know they push they push a new rack of servers into a gridlock station.

00:03:47:05 - 00:04:11:16

Unknown

It's there for the life of the of the rack. You may they have a field engineer come in and service some hardware, but then after it's decommissioned, they roll it out and they put in a new server. But in my in my group, we are constantly moving things around to recreate environments. It's very dynamic, very different. But it also makes it the challenge makes it very fun as well.

00:04:11:18 - 00:04:45:09

Unknown

So Ryan, kind of with that really cool introduction and background, what is a data center and what are its core components? Gotcha. Okay. So I'm going to read a formalized explanation. Just so I don't ramble off or get too technical. And then I'm going to talk about some things in my own words. So a data center is a physical facility to house a group of networked computers, servers for the remote storage, processing and distribution of data.

00:04:45:11 - 00:05:07:23

Unknown

A data center provides security, physical space, power, and cooling for racks of servers and network equipment. Those are the core components. But let me let me just I think I was trying to imagine what it would be like for someone who's never been in a data center to try to grasp the magnitude of scale that is a data center.

00:05:08:01 - 00:05:35:09

Unknown

You know, like you're if you're at home and you have your home computer, maybe it has a gigabit Ethernet port, and maybe you connect to the internet with with one internet service provider and your speed, you know, depending on what you're paying, is your bandwidth isn't huge, right? It's so hard, I think. Had I not had the experience I have, it's can be very difficult to try to imagine what a data center is capable of.

00:05:35:11 - 00:05:56:18

Unknown

It's kind of like if I were, you know, I'm driving a car and trying to imagine what it's like to drive a Formula One car, but that's not even a good analogy because it's not even a formula One car. It's a fleet of Formula One cars in each of them. Each of my racks, we have switches that can process 100 gigabits per second, 100 gigabits per second.

00:05:56:20 - 00:06:32:23

Unknown

And between each of our data centers, each of our labs, we have switches that are can process 400 gigabits per second. There's switches out there that will do 800 gigabits per second. Then there's probably even switches beyond that that I'm, you know, not familiar with yet, but so it's really hard for someone who, when you talk about the scale of what is involved and what these data centers can do and how much planning and organization goes into building them and running them, it's it can be a little hard to comprehend, you know, but it makes it fun, right?

00:06:32:23 - 00:06:56:22

Unknown

I mean, that's one of the reasons why I love my job is because I get to to work with, work with, and touch hardware that is just sometimes blows my mind. I also think about Oracle probably has some of the most advanced data centers in the world, just based on what we do as well. So like this is like the Rolls Royce of like and the Maserati of data centers and what we do every day.

00:06:57:00 - 00:07:22:08

Unknown

Which leads me to my next question. What are the different types of data centers? Right. So I was thinking back to some of my early days when I was at CERN, and I can remember someone telling me that one of the early developers of MySQL or MySQL had a server under his kitchen table. I can't even imagine what I mean.

00:07:22:10 - 00:07:40:02

Unknown

It probably was I'd like a desktop PC or a workstation. It wouldn't have even been a server because that would have been too loud. But if you think about what what happens if your power goes out or if your internet service provider goes out, there goes, you know, so I, I don't know if that's true or not. I just remember somebody telling me about being blown away.

00:07:40:04 - 00:08:11:00

Unknown

But, so you there's some companies that have, on premise, you have an on premise data center. So that's like, if I want to do all the heavy lifting myself, you know, so I'm going to build the data center. I'm going to have a facilities group that is responsible for providing power and cooling. And then I'm also going to have my own teams, you know, like system administrators, network administrators to support all the hardware in that lab.

00:08:11:02 - 00:08:39:09

Unknown

And then, you know, you're also responsible for making sure you have, you know, connections to the theinternet backbone. There's there's a lot involved. So, so on premises, if some, you know, you're a company and you want to control, have that data center managed by you, then there's something called co-location or colo. And what a colo is.

00:08:39:09 - 00:09:08:16

Unknown

And then you have like a third party and they specialize in the planning and the building of the data center. They provide the cooling and, the power and you, the different companies, different corporations or different entities, they can rent space, like maybe you'll rent a floor or you'll rent a cage. And they're also responsible for the security.

00:09:08:18 - 00:09:36:06

Unknown

So I know at colo facilities, you know, they'll have retinal scanners, they'll have man traps. I've been to data centers where they have armed guards, where they have conference rooms that generate, like, white noise. So if you're in a conference room and you're trying to have a private conversation and somebody walks by, they can't overhear you, you know, now, not that anybody would be trying to listen in on your conversation.

00:09:36:06 - 00:10:06:04

Unknown

But if you know, if you're with the NSA or something, you want to make sure that nobody can overhear sensitive information. So it can be very cloak and dagger. So yeah, that's that would be one concern. If you'reat a Colo facility and you're not managing the data center, you know, but having an on premise data center, then you have like a cloud data center, which is, third party that provides compute, storage and networking, resources as a service.

00:10:06:06 - 00:10:52:23

Unknown

And here's where it gets kind of interesting. Now, I'm sure Oracle, we have our own data centers that we build out, but we can also I think OCI also has cloud services at a Colo facility. Right. So Oracle can rent a floor or floors a different, buildings of a Colo facility and they can host their environment for the cloud to others, but they don't have to worry about, you know, maintaining the facility maintenance, providing the power or providing, you know, they just pay, a third party to do that for them.

00:10:53:01 - 00:11:17:04

Unknown

So, Ryan, which leads to my next question. How do data centers manage non software concerns such as power cooling and security. So as you can imagine there's a lot of monitoring. There's a lot of planning and monitoring to ensure everything is stable and secure. A data center typically receives power from the electrical grid of a power company.

00:11:17:04 - 00:11:41:21

Unknown

But what if the grid goes down? So many data centers have diesel generators that will provide power if there'san outage or if there's a disruption. And they'll also have contracts with fuel trucks, to deliver more diesel if there's a sustained outage. Some data centers have other sources, like natural gas. I was always kind of jealous of that.

00:11:41:22 - 00:12:14:11

Unknown

Know that. Wouldn't even have to worry about. Like, if if the electrical grid went down from the local power company. If I could use thermal gas, or natural gas. Excuse me. To to generate power where I didn't have to go to diesel generators, though, you know, so you can have multiple lines of redundancy and then, you know, now with some of the newer data centers with AI and the demands of AI, now they're talking about, nuclear power.

00:12:14:13 - 00:12:40:03

Unknown

And, so I can't even imagine what's involved with that. That's something I still have to learn about and look into. But, Yeah, I know that Oracle is planning to build a there's a new this is public information. Oracle is building a gigawatt scale data center in, that uses three small nuclear reactors or smart. Yeah.

00:12:40:05 - 00:13:08:02

Unknown

So, I'd like to learn more about that, but it's interesting. Right? You know, and then there's thermal. There's the I don't know if you talk in the news when they talk about this interest in Greenland and I've heard, well, they're people are interested in Greenland because of their precious metals, but also it's the amount of space that is there to build out data centers and how you can use the ice sheets for thermal power generator generation.

00:13:08:04 - 00:13:43:13

Unknown

So it's it's yeah, it's really there's a lot there. Then it's a lot more than just precious metals and the strategic strategic location of Greenland. So anyway, but so so yeah there's that. We talked about power cooling obviously. Yeah. If you're in Greenland too cooling you could literally pull in cooler air into the data center. I mean, one of the problems we have locally sometimes in California is if they're if it's a really warm summer and there's a lot of demand on the grid, the grid goes, goes down and you know them.

00:13:43:13 - 00:14:00:18

Unknown

Yeah. Again, we have to work, rely on generators or sometimes I've had a situation where we had to, at least for my data centers, we just had they just had to shut down temporarily. And then we had to bring it back up, which you can never do in a production environment. Keep that in mind. So my environment is more development.

00:14:00:20 - 00:14:26:23

Unknown

I'll also point out so security, physical security. Luckily in my labs, my data centers, we don't have customer data. Right. So that that's nice. We do we do a lot of testing of hardware, but we don't have customer data. The second you have customer data, then you're talking. That's when you're talking again, you know, physical security man traps.

00:14:27:01 - 00:14:57:18

Unknown

Armed guards in some cases, retinal scanners, there's multiple lines, you know. Yeah, I don't know. They'rebuilding a huge new data center near my off of 101 in Montague, near my near where I work in Santa Clara, California. And I don't know if some people, I'm sure people in the know can can immediately spot that it's a data center, but they're they're always like these nondescript buildings.

00:14:57:20 - 00:15:18:19

Unknown

And if you know what a diesel generator looks like and if you see diesel generators can you can pick them out really fast. But, you know, a lot of the times when you have like a data center that has, customer information, there's going to be a fat, you know, there's going to be a perimeter, there's a guard station just to get into the parking lot.

00:15:18:21 - 00:15:38:00

Unknown

And then from the parking lot to get in the data center, there's going to be, you know, kind of like a security checkpoint that you would find the like at the airport. Where are they going? They're going to scan your bags. You can scan your person, and then you get in there and then there's further man traps and checkpoints depending on where you need to go in the data center.

00:15:38:05 - 00:16:08:22

Unknown

You know, because again, like if it's a colo facility, you could have multiple customers in different areas. You want to make sure that nobody who shouldn't be in your area can can get access to it. So where my labs, we do have, you know, badge access and key codes and there's local security personnel, but it's nothing like you would see in some of the data centers that are out there where it's they have very sensitive information and they need they need to make sure that there's no nobody's getting in there.

00:16:09:00 - 00:16:36:01

Unknown

It's like a modern fortress. Really. Ryan, my next question for you, what is the role of data centers in the era of cloud computing in the internet? Yeah. So again, I'm going to read something here. Cloud computing is a term used to describe the delivery of on demand computing resources, hardware storage, database networking and software to businesses and individuals via a network, usually the internet.

00:16:36:03 - 00:16:53:07

Unknown

Cloud computing enables organizations to access and store information without managing their own physical devices or I.T infrastructure. So yeah, I mean, think about if you're let's say you're a smaller organization and you want to.

00:16:53:09 - 00:17:31:11

Unknown

You don't want to have to have pay for the, you know, experienced employees that could handle all this internally, you know, or, or or pay for having a small data center, you know, you want to be able to start in the cloud and then be able to scale in the cloud as you grow, rather than trying to, you know, have a server in your basement or in a in a closet somewhere that's not going to be secure, that doesn't have the power of redundancy, you know, that doesn't have the security.

00:17:31:13 - 00:17:52:02

Unknown

So I really you know, obviously, and it cloud computing is good for any size of corporations. But I really see that for something especially small that wants to this, I think it's really important to to start in the cloud and then to grow, grow as necessary. And that way you don't have to specialize in all of these things.

00:17:52:02 - 00:18:14:04

Unknown

You know, you want to outsource to people that know what they're doing, that have the experience and the expertise to so you can sleep at night, basically. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. One final question, Ryan. And I think it's really important for students and faculty to hear this, as maybe some of them won't work in a data center.

00:18:14:04 - 00:18:46:21

Unknown

Are they do want to work in a data center. What is one piece of advice or maybe multiple pieces of advice that you would give to faculty and students that are interested in either working in a data center or understanding a little bit more about them? You know, it's thinking about this. And the biggest piece of advice I could give to anyone that I would want to give to anyone is to stay curious, question the status quo, dig into the minutia of why things are done a certain way, and look for ways to innovate.

00:18:46:23 - 00:19:17:22

Unknown

For example, improving efficiency. Recognize the value in finding ways to do something better. Innocence is bliss, but ignorance can be fatal. If you're going to build a future, you have to envision the future. You have toimagine it and take the time to think about it and and where your place will be in the future. A big thanks to Ryan for give me a primer on data centers.

00:19:17:22 - 00:19:40:03

Unknown

What's so interesting? I learned so much today, and I think it's really important that we learn and understand where our our data is going and some of the protections that are in place, which I'm really grateful for. So to learn more about Oracle Academy and our resources, check out academy.oracle.com and subscribe to our podcast. Thanks for listening. That wraps up this episode.

00:19:40:08 - 00:19:50:18

Unknown

Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.