It's three in the morning and you can't sleep. So the natural response is of course to bust out your phone
and waste some time on Reddit, get to swiping on Tinder
or blow a few more dollars on that freemium game that's quickly becoming a real problem.
And luckily for you, all of these services work
without a hitch because they're all being provided to you from huge data centers that are expected to be reliable
no matter how many people are connected or what time of day it is.
But how do they stay running with almost no downtime?
Well, our friends at IBM sponsored this video to tell you guys all about it.
And it starts of course with having facilities and computers that are purpose built
to handle lots of incoming connections.
Now, although some services have their own data centers,
many others who either don't need or can't afford a dedicated facility
or need additional capacity actually rent server space and processing time
from a larger companies, a strategy called co-location.
Data centers are typically made up of lots of servers
sitting in racks to maximize how many machines
can fit into one bit of floor space. But of course, setting up a data center
is a lot more complicated than just throwing a bunch
of servers into a warehouse and calling it a day.
Larger data centers hold so much equipment that they are actually built to be sturdier
than your average building to accommodate all the extra weight
from these large racks of servers. Some of them are so large that the workers inside
are even given small vehicles like scooters or bicycles
so they can get around and troubleshoot issues more quickly.
Also, those servers generate a ton of heat
so elaborate cooling systems including water chilling are often employed.
Additionally, data centers are often laid out to be more efficient.
For example, servers will usually either face
toward each other or directly away from each other
to create what are called corridors of hot air
that can be pushed out more easily.
But when there's an environmental hazard that isn't considered, huge problems can result.
For example, a few years ago, Facebook actually had weather in the form of clouds
inside one of its data centers which caused some of the equipment to short out.
So humidity control can also be very important
for larger operations. Some servers are even designed to withstand
even more serious hazards like earthquakes using braces and extra floor mounting.
So of course, data centers are protected with advanced physical and human security.
But what about the more technical challenges? Well, aside from encrypting it,
data is often kept safe by spreading the processing
and storage across multiple locations
rather than having them just on one single machine in one place.
To make this simpler, servers are very often virtualized
meaning that one physical server can be seen as several different systems.
This is incredibly useful because it allows a much greater number of tasks
to be performed by one server. And that's really important for co-location.
So as long as each virtual machine is separated well enough from the others,
this can even bolster security. Load balancing is another technique
that ensures that servers are being used efficiently.
I mean, you don't want a situation where some of the servers are getting slammed with requests
and extra processing while others are sitting idle
like that kid who contributed nothing to your group projects back in school.
So instead, servers are often configured to have their workload and their data balanced
more evenly between them. This prevents overloading of certain machines
and bottlenecks. This is also often done automatically
in cases where one server might need to be taken down for maintenance so that whatever it was working on
can just be picked up by other servers. In a similar vein, redundancy is a critical feature
of any modern data center. Copies of data are usually kept on multiple servers
or even across multiple data centers.
And these facilities often have multiple pipelines
leading out to the public internet in case one internet service provider has a problem.
So all this means that enterprise-grade data centers are designed for at least 99.999% uptime,
which works out to about five minutes
of time offline per year. Some of them are actually even more reliable than that.
And while websites and online services do obviously go down sometimes, it really is amazing
how much has gone into making sure that we can access nearly anything nearly any time.
Like if only everything in your life was that dependable, right?
So thanks for watching, guys. Like, dislike, check out our other videos. Leave a comment if you have this suggestion
for a future fast as possible and don't forget to subscribe because even the most reliable data center
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