Oh, the money in the data center. Yeah. Money. There's a lot of money. Open the
doors of a data center and Data center? Oh, data centers could Data centers Data
center, great. Yeah, data centers. Data centers. They've been dominating the
headlines. New builds, big expansions, and trillions invested. But, what rarely
gets mentioned is that a data center isn't just one thing. They're typically
set up in nine different ways, and there are a few unique distinctions that give
each one an archetype. Kind of like the members of your favorite boy band, but
with less music and even more fan noise,
which is surprisingly the annoying sound that started it all. In the beginning,
uh it was really around enterprise data centers were the data centers, right?
And a lot of the times you used to hear about were rooms called like computer
rooms or server rooms, and there wasn't even a data center, it was a let's put
all of our, you know, servers inside of one room so that all those fan noise and
all that heat can be shoved into the one room, and we don't have to have that on
our office floor. Well, that transitioned into, well, we want to make
sure these servers are running efficiently, and this room's super hot,
we need purpose-built air conditioning, etc. Let's make sure we've got power
reliability, and all of a sudden you've got the like the the primitive makings
of a data center, and every enterprise, every business in the world kind of ran
their own set of servers inside of their own office building. Like John said,
enterprise data centers are where it all began, the founding member of the band,
so to speak. These are run by one company for its own use. Think banks or
big retailers. Since they want to keep their data secure and meet all of their
regulatory compliance rules. While enterprise data storage may have started
small, today these operations tend to be
bigger, and that's in part because there are more options now, like colocation
data centers. These are places that rent out space for companies to put the
servers that they own. A great choice for medium-sized businesses. For a lot
of companies nowadays, you know, when you're a small like, you know, you're a
startup or you're you're a small enterprise or like, you know, a
home business or like that, a lot of folks just use the cloud, right? But once you get to the point where it's
like, "Ah, I I've got probably, you know, a five five-digit kind of monthly
cloud bill or something like that." That, you know, you start thinking buying a server isn't that expensive.
Let me see Let me look at the economics of that and and maybe become a
colocation customer. Colocation data centers help an organization save money
while allowing them to keep control over their gear. That means, though, that the
customer is still responsible for configuring, maintaining, and upgrading
their own hardware and software. Now, if that sounds icky, you may prefer the
next level, managed services data centers. In these, a service provider,
like Equinix or OVH, not only houses your rack, but also handles the
day-to-day running and upkeep of your infrastructure. But, of course,
that'll cost you. Cloud data centers are the mysterious bad boy of the data
center boy band, remote and occasionally
unavailable for reasons no one fully explains. They're so misunderstood. Who
is he? These data centers are all about giving you computing power over the
internet, handled by enormous providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft
Azure. Not only do you not own the computer, you might not even be using a
whole computer. If you think of a cloud data center,
uh there's again, it's a large centralized facility. Uh typically uh
operates 24/7. And it's filled with what I would call
computing infrastructure. Everything from servers to storage systems to sort
of the network equipment. We literally create subsets of of virtual machines in
a process called virtualization. And what that does is it allows, you know,
one computer to act like maybe 10 computers as needed. At the other time,
it allows 10 computers to act like one. And that's the notion of elasticity that
that, you know, we we we we talk about where you know, whole unit can can
operate as one or a subset of a unit can split up uh into a variety of different
components and that allows uh you know, depending on on the ask or or the nature
of um of of what's being processed,
uh it it can it can operate with with with intent. Like Chris mentioned,
elasticity is a cloud data center's secret weapon. It's the system's ability
to adaptively allocate its resources as needed. Think of companies like Netflix,
which mainly uses Amazon's cloud data centers, so they can easily grow or
shrink streaming capacity depending on how many subscribers are watching Love
is Blind, Secret Island, Getaway,
Couples Forever. While cloud data centers can be any
size, they're typically in huge compounds called hyperscale data
centers. These expansive data facilities are used by giants like Google and Meta,
and they're also taking off because of the AI boom. A standard hyperscale data
center typically contains a minimum of 5,000 servers, 500 cabinets, and spans
at least 10,000 square feet or about a quarter acre of floor space. But,
they're still getting larger all the time with Microsoft's latest Fairwater
data center in Wisconsin taking up an enormous 315
acres and counting. Bear in mind though that hyperscale isn't a completely
separate kind of data center, it's a size and design label. You'll hear about
folks talk about hyperscale data centers and you can think about a hyperscale
data center as a hyperscaler operating a data center that's entirely
purpose-built generally for themselves, right? So, one, they'll either
self-build that or they'll kind of uh lease that from a provider, and they
want to have that full dedicated uh region and that could be for their cloud
availability zones, it could be for AI training nowadays, it could be for, you
know, their their SaaS applications that they're delivering to customers. Uh Uh
it could be for ad analytics for instance. I mean, Meta's obviously got
huge amounts of data center capacity, and that's just for them, right? They're
not operating cloud services for anyone else. On the opposite side of the size
spectrum, edge data centers usually have a smaller footprint that fits right in
the thick of a business's work. But today, they're more often thought of as
just data centers that are located closer to where people actually use
their services, like on the edge of a city. This lets things happen faster
with less latency. These kinds of data centers are thriving right now, too. Not
exactly Harry Styles level fame, like hyperscale cloud centers, but definitely
in the Zayn camp. Telecom companies use
them for things like streaming or gaming, but they're also powering
robotics, physical AI, and systems that need real-time processing. What we think
about as as edge is really like kind of like almost a converged edge, which is
close enough that all of the applications, like even things that feel
pretty real-time, like video and and streaming analytics, they can happen
within kind of a 10-ms radius. That's pretty close to as as
as close to the end user as you need to be without actually being on the device
or like on the factory floor or in the vehicle. You can probably sense by now
that these different types can be used in combination with each other, like a
tight three-part harmony. For example, OpenAI generally uses a giant hyperscale
campus full of cloud data centers to power its AI, but they teamed with a
company named Armada to deliver edge AI to remote industrial sites in form
factors as small as a single shipping container. These smaller units are also
known as modular data center. Even within a single data center, there can
still be various types of server racks that allow a single building or campus
to act in many different ways, which brings us to the more niche, perhaps
even buzzwordy types of data centers, which we'll cover right after this
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today. What? Yeah. Hey, here's a couple new kids on the block getting a lot of
attention since AI started shaking things up. High performance, high
density, and sovereign data centers. High performance/high density data
centers draw a lot of energy since they're typically installed in giant
hyperscale sites and pack as much compute as possible in each server
stack. A recent report from the International Energy Agency states that
in the past, a typical data center would consume between 5 and 10 MW of energy.
While the new high density hyperscale projects can push upwards of 100 MW. And
to put that into perspective, a single MW hour is enough energy to supply
roughly 300 homes for a full day. High
density centers are inherently also high power, but not all high power data
centers are high density. If you're confused, it's okay, stick with me here.
Like the boy band references in this video, they're fading fast. But one
example of high power, low density would be something like vintage geographical
weather gear which can draw a ton of power, but the hardware needs to be
spread out since they generate so much heat. Don't expect to hear lots about
these unless they're being retrofitted to pack in modern servers with more
density. Finally, there's sovereign data centers. These are having a bit of a
moment right now and they can take the form of pretty much every type we've
mentioned already. They're popping up as governments and businesses realize that
to control their data, it needs to be stored in a place where their local laws
provide jurisdiction. That said, this can get murky. For instance, US
companies operating in Canadian data centers are not safe from US government
interference. For full sovereignty, you need the data center and the company
operating under the same flag. So, those
are the types, such as they are, but that's not the only way to categorize
data centers. Another is the Uptime Institute's tier system. It ranks data
centers from tier one at the bottom to tier four at the top, based on things
like uptime, which means how long the system has been running without
interruptions, redundancy, and how well they handle failures. And basically, it
looks at four tiers. It looks at, you know, things like your availability,
making sure that you've got available power that's consistent to process up to
the maximum that you're you're allowed to process, cuz typically there's peaks
and valleys in in consumption as well. It looks at redundancy, which means if
one of these things fail, if your power fails, then what's your backup? If your
cooling system fails, what's your backup? If, you know, your
part of your IT infrastructure or your or your chips and servers go down,
what's your backup? It also looks at fault fault tolerance.
So, things like, you know, how often does do these things have
errors, etc. You know, what's what's in the manufacturer's specs and and how are
they performing? In some ways, I would call it a bit of an audit. What Chris
told us is basically the checklist data centers live and die by. Power, backups,
backups for the backups, and then backups for those, too. If you want to
get a little more up close and personal with a data center, check out this video
of Linus touring one, and drop a comment if you can guess what type it is.