it's 3:00 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 colocation 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 can 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 colocation 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 percent 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 again this video
is brought to you by IBM did you know that resiliency is the most important
facet of your data center I mean you can have all the speed performance and
features in the world but if your servers are down who cares IBM Z has the industry-leading
resiliency needed to ensure that your bottom line doesn't suffer from planned
maintenance or unplanned downtime your whole data center could go up in flames
and your recovery could happen without a hitch when it comes to continuous
availability IBM Z customers achieve five and six nines so that's ninety nine
point nine nine nine and ninety nine point nine nine nine nine percent or
greater uptime and they say the smaller IBM Z footprint can essentially replace
as many as 100 servers so reduced downtime scaled to support large
workloads and get peace of mind with IBM Z the leader in data center technology
so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos leave a
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