Introduction
As Lab Specialists, we are usually confined to the walls of our offices or our own personal studies as we work primarily with virtual infrastructure. Our day-to-day tasks involve building and maintaining labs, managing cloud resources and handling tickets raised by the community. Last week, the team were invited to go to one of the company’s datacentre locations. This site visit certainly gave me a greater appreciation of the physical infrastructure that exists to facilitate our operations. Within this blog post I’ll be presenting what I believe to be key takeaways and insights gained from the visit along with tasks performed by the Lab Specialist team at the Datacentre.
Entry to the Datacentre
As we arrived at the Datacentre, we soon realised that the Datacentre followed strict access controls. We encountered barriers upon entry and had to follow protocol to ensure what complied with their standards of procedure – this included checks of our government-issued identification.
Initial impressions: A bastion of digital advancement
Upon entry, we were all astounded by the sheer scale and magnitude of the facility. We encountered rows upon rows of server racks, green and red status lights blinking continuously, and the vociferous nature of the fans bringing some much-needed coolness to the area.
From the first 5 minutes of being there, I realised that a data centre is much more than a warehouse for servers—it is a well-crafted environment where power, energy, networking and security work in conjunction to ensure availability and reliability.
Cloud Operations really do have a physical home!
I, personally, often take for granted the readily available nature of our cloud-based organisation, but seeing the physical hardware live in action illustrated the true magnitude of the operation at hand and the associated disaster recovery measures put in place. We were able to see servers distributed across multiple racks to prevent single points of failure. We were also able to bear witness to backup generators that ensured continuous power supply. The team were also able to understand the intricacies of network connectivity. It was fascinating to see how precisely Firewalls, Switches, cables etc had to be connected to ensure smooth operation.
Cooling and Energy Efficiency
Walking into the Datacentre for the first time felt very much like stepping into the sauna after tiresome gym session – it immediately had me very thankful for the cooling mechanisms integrated with the Datacentre. With thousands of servers running 24/7, cooling is certainly a major challenge. This trip helped us gain insight to the hot and cold aisle containment cooling mechanism that was able to regulate airflow efficiently.
Tasks completed: NVMe upgrades
As this was also a Hands-On visit, the team were tasked with carrying out some vital hardware upgrades on a selection of hosts. We were given an overview of the host configurations and then carried out the hardware replacements including NVMe replacements for12 individual hosts. It was great experience to get involved with this as it again strengthened our appreciation for the physical side of cloud computing.
Conclusion
Our visit to the Datacentre was an enlightening experience that I and the rest of the team would like to do again. Although we work in a virtualised, remote environment, everything we deploy and maintain in the cloud ultimately runs on real servers in real facilities. To have gained discernment over the hardware that powers our cloud organisation will undoubtedly help us understand better the issues that can arise on a day-to-day basis and the subsequent actions we take to resolve them.
The team left the Datacentre with a heightened sense of responsibility, realising that behind every lab instance we deploy, there’s a carefully designed infrastructure ensuring its performance, security, and reliability.
Written by: Ore Soetan, Lab Specialist