Visiting MediaCloud Data Center

On 12th may we had the occasion to visit MediaCloud Data Center placed on 22@ district in Barcelona.

MediaCloud is an enterprise from Mediapro group which provide last generation cloud solutions and advanced Data Center services, managed in a unified way. It offer IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and Cloud services.

We had the opportunity to see some of the most important parts of this data center, specifically the servers and storage cabins rooms, the network equipment room, and SAIs and cooling equipment. After, I will talk about some characteristics of these rooms.

Viewing this data center, we can check how is implemented in a real level all topics that we had seen in this course. We can see which equipment they use, which facilities they choose to implement its data center, the prepared space reservation for future expansion and the capital expenses to construct the data center. All of that illustrates all topics learned the last weeks.

Then, I will explain briefly the most important parts that we see:

Equipment

We observed there were a lot of Cisco devices, from the most complex ones such as Nexus, up to plain ones that we are much more familiarized in our labs. We saw that servers were organized in blades and in a high integration way, and also for the storage cabins.

Climate

We observed that they implement a hot aisle / cold aisle where the cold aisle is closed for direct cold air through the equipment and we can check the power of cooling machines which cools the air through cold water distributed from the canalization of 22@ infrastructure system.

Security

In terms of physical security, the system has some measures to protect the rooms and equipment: double door control check guarded every moment, closed TV system guarded every moment and access cards.

Fire extinguisher system

This system is gas based, which progressively decrease the rate of oxygen on air that implies fire extinguish giving time to technicians to quickly leave the room. In this way any device are wet and after this episode they can continue run properly.