In this episode host Tyra Peirce speaks with Oracle development data center manager Ryan Lucas. Ryan tells Tyra about the key components of a data center, and what it takes to run a data center. --------------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00:00:00 - 00:00:34:09 Unknown Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps our next generation's workforce. 00:00:34:11 - 00:00:58:17 Unknown I'm your host, Tara Crockett Pierce. In this episode, I speak with Oracle Data Center manager Ryan Lucas. Ryan breaks down the basics of data centers what they are, how they work, and why they're essential for empowering your favorite streaming services to securing business critical data. So far to securing business critical data. Data centers are the unseen force behind modern technology. 00:00:58:17 - 00:01:27:03 Unknown Welcome, Ryan. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So go ahead and start off. Ryan, can you give me a little bit about your background and your role at Oracle? Yeah. So I first started working as a system administrator, for the Java group at Sun Microsystems back in 2002. My responsibilities included deploying and maintainingsystems, like Solaris, Linux, and even windows servers. 00:01:27:05 - 00:02:03:20 Unknown And I would also troubleshoot network, software and hardware issues. Eventually my responsibilities included backing up important files like source code for the Java Development Kit or otherwise known as JDK. I've been at Oracle for 16 years. Yeah. So in my current role, I help manage labs that, are essentially on-premise data centers. They may not be as large as something you would see like an on OCI site. 00:02:03:22 - 00:02:33:11 Unknown But the labs that I support, they when you're inside them, they look like data centers. And we, they basically are used to to test Oracle engineered systems. So my group we help provide local support for the engineers of Oracle Engineered Systems. We have systems that have been released to the public. And we have systems that have not been released to the public. 00:02:33:13 - 00:03:01:03 Unknown And so what we are responsible for, you know, deploying, maintaining, keeping these servers running and helping create testing environments so that engineers can make sure that the engineered, that their hardware works as advertised. And then, sometimes even after hardware has been released, if a customer has some kind of concern, we may have to recreate their environment in our lab. 00:03:01:09 - 00:03:21:06 Unknown Well, I call it lab, but it's a data center. And that way, we can try to discover if the customer's having a lot of times the customers having an issue because it's a customer error. So, you know, maybe the customer is trying to use our hardware in ways that we hadn't, you know, thought about or wasn't really designed for. 00:03:21:08 - 00:03:47:03 Unknown But, yeah, eventually there will be some issues that we have to work through. And, and so it's it's very dynamic. So a typically like a, like an OCI production data center, you know, that is very structured. You know, all the cables are pristine a specific length. You know they push they push a new rack of servers into a gridlock station. 00:03:47:05 - 00:04:11:16 Unknown It's there for the life of the of the rack. You may they have a field engineer come in and service some hardware, but then after it's decommissioned, they roll it out and they put in a new server. But in my in my group, we are constantly moving things around to recreate environments. It's very dynamic, very different. But it also makes it the challenge makes it very fun as well. 00:04:11:18 - 00:04:45:09 Unknown So Ryan, kind of with that really cool introduction and background, what is a data center and what are its core components? Gotcha. Okay. So I'm going to read a formalized explanation. Just so I don't ramble off or get too technical. And then I'm going to talk about some things in my own words. So a data center is a physical facility to house a group of networked computers, servers for the remote storage, processing and distribution of data. 00:04:45:11 - 00:05:07:23 Unknown A data center provides security, physical space, power, and cooling for racks of servers and network equipment. Those are the core components. But let me let me just I think I was trying to imagine what it would be like for someone who's never been in a data center to try to grasp the magnitude of scale that is a data center. 00:05:08:01 - 00:05:35:09 Unknown You know, like you're if you're at home and you have your home computer, maybe it has a gigabit Ethernet port, and maybe you connect to the internet with with one internet service provider and your speed, you know, depending on what you're paying, is your bandwidth isn't huge, right? It's so hard, I think. Had I not had the experience I have, it's can be very difficult to try to imagine what a data center is capable of. 00:05:35:11 - 00:05:56:18 Unknown It's kind of like if I were, you know, I'm driving a car and trying to imagine what it's like to drive a Formula One car, but that's not even a good analogy because it's not even a formula One car. It's a fleet of Formula One cars in each of them. Each of my racks, we have switches that can process 100 gigabits per second, 100 gigabits per second. 00:05:56:20 - 00:06:32:23 Unknown And between each of our data centers, each of our labs, we have switches that are can process 400 gigabits per second. There's switches out there that will do 800 gigabits per second. Then there's probably even switches beyond that that I'm, you know, not familiar with yet, but so it's really hard for someone who, when you talk about the scale of what is involved and what these data centers can do and how much planning and organization goes into building them and running them, it's it can be a little hard to comprehend, you know, but it makes it fun, right? 00:06:32:23 - 00:06:56:22 Unknown I mean, that's one of the reasons why I love my job is because I get to to work with, work with, and touch hardware that is just sometimes blows my mind. I also think about Oracle probably has some of the most advanced data centers in the world, just based on what we do as well. So like this is like the Rolls Royce of like and the Maserati of data centers and what we do every day. 00:06:57:00 - 00:07:22:08 Unknown Which leads me to my next question. What are the different types of data centers? Right. So I was thinking back to some of my early days when I was at CERN, and I can remember someone telling me that one of the early developers of MySQL or MySQL had a server under his kitchen table. I can't even imagine what I mean. 00:07:22:10 - 00:07:40:02 Unknown It probably was I'd like a desktop PC or a workstation. It wouldn't have even been a server because that would have been too loud. But if you think about what what happens if your power goes out or if your internet service provider goes out, there goes, you know, so I, I don't know if that's true or not. I just remember somebody telling me about being blown away. 00:07:40:04 - 00:08:11:00 Unknown But, so you there's some companies that have, on premise, you have an on premise data center. So that's like, if I want to do all the heavy lifting myself, you know, so I'm going to build the data center. I'm going to have a facilities group that is responsible for providing power and cooling. And then I'm also going to have my own teams, you know, like system administrators, network administrators to support all the hardware in that lab. 00:08:11:02 - 00:08:39:09 Unknown And then, you know, you're also responsible for making sure you have, you know, connections to the theinternet backbone. There's there's a lot involved. So, so on premises, if some, you know, you're a company and you want to control, have that data center managed by you, then there's something called co-location or colo. And what a colo is. 00:08:39:09 - 00:09:08:16 Unknown And then you have like a third party and they specialize in the planning and the building of the data center. They provide the cooling and, the power and you, the different companies, different corporations or different entities, they can rent space, like maybe you'll rent a floor or you'll rent a cage. And they're also responsible for the security. 00:09:08:18 - 00:09:36:06 Unknown So I know at colo facilities, you know, they'll have retinal scanners, they'll have man traps. I've been to data centers where they have armed guards, where they have conference rooms that generate, like, white noise. So if you're in a conference room and you're trying to have a private conversation and somebody walks by, they can't overhear you, you know, now, not that anybody would be trying to listen in on your conversation. 00:09:36:06 - 00:10:06:04 Unknown But if you know, if you're with the NSA or something, you want to make sure that nobody can overhear sensitive information. So it can be very cloak and dagger. So yeah, that's that would be one concern. If you'reat a Colo facility a
