Random Thoughts On The Internet And How Data Centers Form The Backbone Of The Internet

By Author: Greenfield Software
Total Articles: 5
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The other day I was talking to my mother about how the latest advances in technology over the past decade and a half have changed our lives for the better.
Growing up in the eighties and nineties when my mother used to tell me about the time her family got their first television set and how that changed a lot of things, and how I was lucky to be born at a time when you could watch a tennis match live from the other side of the world, we had never imagined that by the time I would become an adult, the world I had grown up in would seem just as dated as the world our parents had grown up in.
I no longer have to go out to pay my bills like my father did, and a time will come will cheques will become virtually extinct like in some parts of Europe. I can chat to my loved ones in any part of the world without worrying about the cost, and even use video chat as a method of communication. I still remember the look on my father's face when we did a video chat the first time. The Internet, undoubtedly, has changed the world in ways that we could not have imagined even a decade ago. But is that all?
Do we owe these advances ...
... in technology just to the growth of the Internet? Would it be fair to suggest that the World Wide Web is the biggest thing that happened in the world of technology in the last couple of decades? My answer would be a resounding NO. The Internet is just one side of the advances in technology that is visible to the end user. Who has a computer and does not know what a browser is for? Of course, it is used to access the Internet.
But what about the vast amounts of data that is stored online and is transmitted across the world at the click of a button? Take Facebook, for instance. My friends post more pictures online for free than I can keep track of and millions of these pictures are posted online everyday and stored for what one might say eternity. When I type a query into Google, I sometimes get hundreds of thousands of results and all this data is actually stored on Google's servers! My bank keeps records of all my transactions and when I make an online payment it is immediately updated on my screen. It would be wrong to say that the World Wide Web is the only technology responsible for this giant advances in the way data is used and shared across the world. There are vast data centers that have all the hardware where this data is stored. They are to the World Wide Web and company networks what a building's foundation is to a building. When a foundation is faulty, it causes problems throughout the entire structure and the entire building is at risk.
Some data centers can be quite massive. You would get tired walking from one part of the data center to another. It is challenging to keep track of all the servers, computers and other equipment in the facility and the problem is compounded by the huge growth in the data that is stored in these facilities. One of the biggest constraints faced by data center managers is the lack of space. They have to figure out how to make the most of the space available to them and for that they have to ensure that all the equipment are running in perfect condition. You cannot take a server off the rack and see if all its components are working. There is also no way to make sure that all the data stored on the server is in perfect condition and has not been corrupted in any way. It is practically impossible to tell which among the hundreds of servers in a data center are not functioning properly or heating up too soon. Managing a data center requires far more sophisticated technology and work that can be done manually or with the help of spreadsheets and Visio tools.
There are tools for managing data centers effectively, tools that can be found in DCIM or Data Center Infrastructure Management software. DCIM is a new category of enterprise software that creates a map of everything in a data center, monitors and analyzes assets and resource usage parameters that help to identify problem areas that need fixing. For example, the Infrastructure Manager of a Data Center would be hard pressed to determine which servers could be heating up beyond tolerance levels. DCIM software, on the other hand, has the ability to alert the Infrastructure Manager of such a situation. DCIM can also identify the servers that can no longer function optimally, so that the data center manager can decommission them. This helps the company or business that owns the data center save on costs, sometimes even millions of dollars depending on the size and scale of the data center.
It would be wrong to say that saving on costs is the only benefit derived from installing DCIM software. There are other benefits like averting a potential disaster. If you are reading this and you live in Calgary, you probably know about the fire at a data center in July last year that brought down emergency services, and even delayed hundreds of surgeries scheduled to take place at local hospitals. It may be impossible to prevent a natural disaster by making use of DCIM, but fires that start when a server overheats and explodes can be prevented.
DCIM makes it possible to mitigate the impact of a downtime that is not due to natural causes. For example, a planned equipment upgrade can potentially cause a failure. DCIM software can make such transitions smooth by mapping the inter-linkages between various equipment in a data center so that redundancy paths can be invoked. The end-user also gets time to create back-up data if required. Some data centers need to function 24x7 in order to retain customers. I switched my main bank account from a very well known bank that is not particularly famous for its quality of service to a bank that offers excellent online banking facilities. In my five years with the bank I have never experienced any problem accessing my bank account online.
I showed some pictures of data centers to my mother and she was fascinated. While she is no techie, she had no trouble understanding that data centers form the backbone of the Internet.