"Next generation datacenters desing" presentation by Gustau Serra

Last Thursday's speaker at the Networks Management and Planification class is called Gustau Serra and he is a La Salle graduate who works at Mediacloud. This company is part of the Mediapro group and has provides support to its clients on their journey to the cloud. It is based in Barcelona.

With technologies such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence or the Internet of Things on the rise, cloud services are becoming increasingly important. Datacenters are growing more and more and companies are beginning to outsource this service, often opting for cloud solutions.

But what does it mean for a solution to be in the cloud? Basically, that it runs on the server of the company that I contracted. So this company (could be Amazon, Microsoft, among others) is already in charge of the maintenance and availability of the servers.

These cloud services can be public, as in the case of the aforementioned companies that share their infrastructure, or private, that is, someone from home offers processing or storage services, for example. And depending on the country in which the datacenter is, different regulations will have to be complied with. For example, in the US it is legal for the government to request the data it has stored from a company, while in Europe it is not. This also brings some benefits such as a reduction in computing costs, especially at non-peak hours since the price of the services depends on the demand. In the end, what is always sought is a compromise between cost and availability.

There are also different offers from companies that offer cloud services such as Mediacloud. There are companies that offer the placement of equipment and its respective support as a service. There are companies that only offer software as a service (SaaS). This is useful for example if we want to use email in the cloud and we contract Outlook, although it is not the only service that Microsoft offers.

This speaker also told us about datacenters and several of its requirements. We can find:

• the transformation center: where the energy that comes from a company is transformed.
• the independent power supply system: it allows the datacenter to work for some minutes if the main power supply is disconnected.
• the electrical distribution
• fire detection.
• security: personal access control, closed circuit television.
• the wiring: it must be organized and structured because otherwise a lot of time is lost when changing between projects. A tidy design is a determining factor.
• cooling: the machines work at 22º and can get very hot, so designs such as cold aisle and hot aisle must be used, or the servers can be cooled down with immersive cooling, which is a new option developed in Catalonia that consists of immersing the servers in non conductive liquid that does not alter its operation.

Finally, during Gustau's talk, we saw a video of Google's datacenter in Oregon. We saw the solution to most of the requirements that we previously mentioned and the amount of infrastructure required to manage the data of one of the largest technology companies in the world. It can be seen at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDAYZU4A3w0

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Matías Balzamo