Tour a Microsoft Data Center

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: but a lot of people don't understand parts of a data center and so that's what i thought i'd help explain to people a little bit too so we've got a a data center here this is microsoft's data center and there is a global infrastructure map that they have and of course they have the cloud because it shows where the cloud is that you can you can look at and they show where they have data centers all over the world most companies don't do that they want to keep their data center locations private but microsoft has you know general locations where you'd expect to see things around the world in different locations in different areas and all of these are interconnected by things like undersea cables there's actually a company called submarine cable map that shows the submarine cables that are all over the world and they typically are are laid by you know cable laying you know resources special ships that lay cables and it's something that is constantly being done so that's what's creating all of this capability here so if we go to take a tour and we go to the microsoft virtual data center it takes us into the cloud kind of an interesting little little video thing here so we're going to enter the lobby and the lobby is the portion you'd go to microsoft wants to make sure i'm a human here the cloud is located in data center okay so this is their part of their story lab effort we live in the cloud we can explore the lobby and it's it's basically what you would expect if you move your mouse back and forth we can see different you know areas of the lobby we can actually scroll and see around here these are actually entrances where you'd go from the lobby into the operations room these are very highly secure locations that require you typically to go into a room and then you're released and go into another room but the lobby is something that is accessible you know from for anybody to go look at and and be able to view if they're interested now microsoft has these little videos here uh that they explain too and we'll take a look at at some of them at some point when we go through so let's go from the lobby into the operations room okay so the operations room is where the people that are running things take care of it they people don't work where the computers are located they work in an operations room where they they are able to manage everything from consoles and so they've got cubicles they've got you know panels on the wall that show them the status of everything from the amount of data going in and out to what's happening in other data centers around the world because what they have since these are all connected if one data center couldn't operate other data centers could take over at work and so there's actually a backup process that they have for being able to make sure that they can run 24 7 even if they lose a data center because of a natural disaster or other things so i haven't picked on these buttons here okay so this is a little information here as you click on these buttons this is the facility team they're monitoring telemetry for all equipment this is they're using ai to help them manage it they're using ai operations to reduce their staff and so we can take a look around let's see what this one says they have a project one in the maze they're engineering reliability so it predicts reliability and availability we're going to look at the mechanical area next how do they keep the cloud up and running it's a little video that you know we can watch if we have time these little blue dots will have things that'll explain what's going on in each area in each area that you're looking at personal protective equipment you know different things they have a hollow lens is data center experts can conduct remote assisted operations what means that they can maintain things from another location so it's really a pretty interesting environment so you i'm just clicking on my mouse and dragging this around to take a look at different areas okay and so i can actually even zoom in on some things if i scroll up or scroll down they've got a little bit of animation here for you know some of the characters that are in here what's this screen well there's a little arrow here the next room is the mechanical area let's let's go through the doorway here and go into the mechanical area well the mechanical area is where the guts of keeping power and cooling and everything like that running are there's a lot to it so they have a lot of stuff that needs to be managed this is a lot of equipment that's outside this is one of the reasons data centers are so big is that it just takes a lot of work to keep them running what's this this is the cooling you know of a data center so these are you know temperature is really important and they have to keep the air clean and so they used uh they want to call it adiabatic cooling it's very you know it doesn't use a lot of water and so they they're showing how it evaporates especially so there's a lot of environmental controls that are going into making sure that data centers are interesting i don't know that microsoft was going to be investing about 80 you know billion dollars in data centers this year a huge amount then they have these server racks that's where actually the computers are located servers are the type of form factor the physical shape of the the computers that are kept and cool and so they really have a lot that they can keep track of there we're not going to go in the server room yet energy they they try and make sure they're renewable these are big you know issues in terms of making sure they create and try and minimize the environmental impact on these because they do have a lot of need for resources and other things and waste and you know disposing of things water is a requirement as well so this whole environmental area is is really important they generate a lot of heat as well and so they're redistributing this to uh other networks they always have a little learn more link that'll take you to a website you know to different places that'll show you more about it that you're interested in they have a little video you can watch on some of these things to learn more about it how they they power it if you're interested in watching more detail about it but this is just a really big heavy cooling heating solar panels other things that are out there that basically enable them to run all the computers that are inside the data center so the next thing is the server room the server room is really what we we think of as where they keep all these cloud computers so when we use one drive or when you're using microsoft 365 or when you're downloading a new version of windows these are the servers are what are actually making this just a server is just another word for a computer but it's a computer that typically has one purpose and that's to fit into a rack and be very efficient so if you wonder well netflix is or i mean nvidia is selling all these you know computers these are all computers that are here you know they're all in racks they're all wired together in different ways and but they don't have monitors or keyboards all of the monitors and keyboards are in the operation center and they can actually log in and monitor for any individual computer here directly from the operation center you can see they've got a tremendous amount of wiring up in the ceiling here all the internet cables and wiring racks that exist this is where the guts of all the computing capability is so they've got a lot of security you know that they have capabilities of this is you know the hardware they have over 4 million servers that one of these individual little blades the areas here that you see is considered a server we'll zoom in on here see if we can find one okay so this is one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven servers i don't know why it's 11 it's just the way the rack is built this is a power supply for the servers above and then there's you know ones below they're used by a lot of companies they they they run their brand name of their cloud services called azure azure and that brand name is what they they run it and so they break down i think they break down their income based on how much they generate from cloud azure services but microsoft also has an agreement with open ai to run the data centers you know for and provide data center capability for open ai which makes 10 chat gpt so they handle a lot of transactions a lot of capabilities let's see if we've got a little these are virtual machines here that basically lets them use a single computer for many different functions and not just a single dedicated use or activity but this is one of the more interesting things where does this enter the hot aisle i have no idea what the harder okay so this is the back of it where all of the power supplies are on the back side of these okay so this is the actual back side of these servers where they're connected up to power and you can see the high voltage you know warnings and things like that that you're looking at what does this say okay they want to reuse the heat they generate a lot of heat computers get hot if you ever had a laptop on your lap it generates a lot of heat they have these specialized power distribution units so it's kind of interesting watching some of the investors investment news about ai because they they kind of talk about it like the gold rush in california and alaska is that there are people that get the gold okay so if you look at nvidia you know or you know amazon or microsoft you know they're getting the gold they're the ones offering ai but somebody's got to make these power units somebody's got to make these racks somebody's got to make the air conditioning somebody's got to make the power that powers these things and other things so it's just an amazing amount of information that you can get about these that you can find out through them and this is a little this data center has these little buttons and dots and you can always go to their website and learn more about what they're doing and how they do it okay so just uh a lot of interesting tools that you can take a look at and that they've done with 3d imaging here to give you the ability to to get through in different areas that you might be interested in and trying out and exploring now let's go to the circular center i don't know why they call it that name but that's their their recycling center okay so they basically are able to take the equipment once they are done with it they disassemble it they prepare it for recycling pickup and activity to be able to make sure they they minimize there's a lot of money in recycling too a lot of electronic components have things the network room okay the network room is where the data center connects to the network primarily the internet and so in order to get data that cable that cable thing has to come from say you know the pacific ocean or the atlantic ocean onto a land point and then get moved from land you know over through a buried cable to the data center and the network room is where all of this cabling comes together so these cables all go to different racks in the server room or they go outside to different connections to the outside world and so they invest in a lot of of capacity for their network so that's why they have so many cables some of these are are fiber some of them are um you know copper but they just have a tremendous amount of capacity this is how data travels if you're interested in any of these videos let me know and we'll play them you know but if you're ever curious how does data travel over these cables whether withdrawing cash updating your medical records [00:14:26] Speaker 2: can you hear that okay okay buying something online or catching up with friends on teams you are using the cloud but how does this information move from you to the microsoft cloud data centers and back traffic from internet service providers and telecom companies enters and exits the microsoft global network at our edge nodes hundreds of these pops are placed within milliseconds of global population centers the data is encrypted on the microsoft wan flowing across its hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber and subsea cable to the company's unrivaled number of data center regions where the data is processed and stored from ai to machine learning to next generation security azure services harness the power to the microsoft cloud to advance the boundaries of computing in new more affordable and sustainable ways using our availability zones data is safely stored in not just one data center but across multiple data centers in each region and from the servers information travels back out through the microsoft [00:15:35] Speaker 1: network to users and edge devices around the world it's just a fascinating you know infrastructure that you can have now there's satellites that exist as well so it's not just like cables on the land [00:15:52] Speaker 2: this ground station as a service offering is part of our network and is one of many ground stations that extend the reach of our cloud to space it links businesses to satellites to support new data [00:16:04] Speaker 1: services and improve communications around the world this this is an actual facility those are photographs and 3d images of a real facility i don't know where this specific one is located but they they have hundreds of these all over the world they their videos say we live in the cloud so you know the whole idea is that more and more and more is happening around here that that they're looking so they're always innovating this whole idea of okay we're using a desktop computer or using microsoft word or we're using zoom this whole thing depends on data centers to make it possible for us to do these things and data center expertise is really really important to making these things happen so what do they got they've got undersea data centers that they're working on so this is what's going on in in some of their research projects [00:17:07] Speaker 2: i'm not getting there's the audio so the bottom of the atlantic ocean known as project natick this and previous drops tested the practicality and benefits of underwater data centers the natick vessel is over 40 feet long loaded with 12 racks and contains 864 servers natick's equipment failure rate is one-eighth the rate of data centers on land where corrosion temperature fluctuations and human contact contributed the native capsule is filled with nitrogen which causes less damage to the servers over time than oxygen reliably cold underwater temperatures conserve resources by cooling the servers and helping to optimize energy usage an undersea cable powers natick with 100 percent renewable wind and solar energy from the local power grid project natick began as an effort to sustainably provide cloud services to coastal populations and now gives us a glimpse of what is possible for data centers in the future they're working with dna [00:18:17] Speaker 1: molecules to see if they can store information and creating synthetic molecules here's their information on quantum computing it's it's kind of interesting i'm going to play this one and it kind of helps explain a [00:18:33] Speaker 3: little bit about quantum computing the microsoft quantum program is a global scale program focused on enabling commercial scale quantum computation it's really about bringing quantum impact to people today and [00:18:47] Speaker 4: tomorrow quantum computing has the opportunity to make a impact on the world right now in a revolutionary [00:18:54] Speaker 3: game-changing way we're focused on developing every element of the quantum system an end-to-end full stack technology from the algorithms to the software stack to the hardware itself to reach a commercial scale quantum quantum computer it requires revolutionary discoveries across physics computer science [00:19:14] Speaker 4: mathematics material science all which have to come together to make topological qubits and multi-topological qubit systems we have a team that's spread across eight labs around the world although we're spread out we are one team [00:19:28] Speaker 5: working towards one goal building a quantum computer is your task it's all the way from the software all the way down to where we control the quantum states that makes up the qubits here in the lab we have fabrication technologies nanotechnology that allows us to turn the dumb materials into smart devices the microsoft [00:19:49] Speaker 3: quantum program allows us to dream big azure is the world's computer you have access to the tools services and solutions in a very familiar environment and with azure quantum we're bringing quantum solutions forward to that environment we're bringing quantum impact to your fingertips we're working with enterprises and companies around the world energy optimization risk and financial analysis in medical diagnostics to identify where quantum solutions will bring about impact for their businesses a great example is kate western reserve university [00:20:23] Speaker 6: we're working with azure quantum to optimize the way that people get mri scans patients have access to faster and better mri scans in a way that wasn't possible before we can make those scans up to three times faster by [00:20:40] Speaker 3: using quantum solutions on classical hardware today the really high level scientific goal is to be able to solve problems that we can't solve today azure quantum enables every developer every person every enterprise to really tap in and succeed in their businesses and their endeavors with quantum solution and that's incredibly powerful so i mean it's just [00:21:04] Speaker 1: amazing what you think of a company like microsoft and we think of just a couple of things we get from them but they're doing all this work the same thing is not happening just with microsoft i mean google is doing this amazon is doing this amazon is doing this apple is doing you know this as well and so they're they're really taking things to an incredible level of expertise and and skills where they're doing some things that they're they're looking at doing and trying to get some approach to it let me go back a little bit here i showed you the submarine map here you can actually identify cables this is called submarine cablemap.com a couple of things that control where a data center goes the data center goes wherever they they have power that's one of the things they need to work with the aspects of the land and the permitting that they need to do but one of the biggest demands on it is is power that doesn't take a lot of staff to run a data center but you know it does take a lot of construction capability so sometimes construction work will move in temporarily into an area to build a data center they try and find an area that has as less likely to be impacted by natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes and volcanoes and things like that the power is probably one of the biggest issues of being able to get to a data set of being able to power a data center it takes a lot of energy to do it and not a lot of people want a data center in an urban area so they're typically locating them and then they've got to make sure they can run the cabling for the internet connectivity the data capability and microsoft and google and amazon they all have their own network of cables that they own 100 of and so there are such big cloud providers and data center providers because increasingly if you look at a company like say you know pizza hut or you know uber or you know macy's or somebody that it's easier to pay somebody like microsoft to run all your data center work for you and just buy it on a monthly service as a subscription than to build your own data centers which is what companies used to do or put your own equipment in data centers and so that's that's become a huge part of their business increasingly is microsoft amazon and google are all big companies that provide data center services and you can actually even lease a virtual windows computer as long as you have a web access through you know you can get a virtual windows computer i think they charge about 30 a month for it is what they charge but you don't need to actually have a physical windows computer and if you buy more you know so for a company rather than giving putting windows desktops on everybody's desk they could just put a web browser a simple you know a simple device on everybody's desk and say you're going to access windows applications and all of our applications through the cloud like azure and that's that's a huge business for for those three three companies it's something we don't get to see very often i thought well this would be interesting to take a little tour with everybody and see a few things because that when you when you go out you say gee i want to get to my one drive or my amazon cloud or where's my gmail it's all being run in facilities like this now obviously google owns the facilities that run google drive and gmail and but amazon rent space and google rent space and microsoft rent space to all you know a lot of different companies so it's a lot of people you may be getting your orders from you know a retail store you know from services computing services that they're running with one of those three providers and they're just so big that it's really hard for anybody else to compete against that right now so it's becoming monopolized a little bit but those three are the big competitors take care All right. Bye, everybody.