Data Center Visit

Finally I was nominated for ECA (Essential Competency Acquisition). It was too late but its better late than never. As a part of Module 1, we had a visit to our Data Center. On 26th Oct post lunch, nine of us (I, Jagruti Singavi, Madhura Chodankar, Vrushali Darade, Padmanaban, Velankanni, Anto, Akash Kotian and Solairaj) booked OLA and reached our Data Center. I cannot disclose our DC address. Sanket Chavda and the new joinee Pratik, joined us. We reached the main building, made an entry into the register. Then had a Sandwich party sponsored by Chavda. We went in, passed the main building, walked into a turning lane. The scene was just like those in movies where there are fighting sequences between hero and villain. We reached the main gate, did an entry into the register and got visitor's id cards. We went on the second floor, again made an entry into the register, kept our bags on the small closets and wore the given sandals. We entered the actual place now. There was a security check where a password has to be entered in order to get into the DC room. We were given clear instructions for not to swipe against any card access point. Since we were visiting for the first time, we assumed that all the rooms belong to AP. But our assumption was wrong; many companies had their DCs here. We entered our room of servers and storage. It was cold with AC breezes coming from gaps below the ground. There were electronic boxes and boxes kept in sections and interconnected by wires and cables. This reminded of all the studies of Computer Network during Graduation days. Actually got to see many things in real. First we saw the Core Network Setup, followed by Checkpoints and Extendors. We saw ARUBA, Cisco VPN, IPS and the very famous Palo alto (which Abhishek Nagrale and Sanket Chavda kept reciting every single day). We saw the EMC2 flash storage kept in the corner. We walked through very carefully so as to not unplug any wire by mistake. We were further explained on Top of the Rack Architecture, SAN, static switches, blades and chases, tapes and its working, SAM, etc. We were curios to see our application servers: ERP HANA, CRM HANA, IBM Server, BW/MDG, Invoice Sign SafeNet, etc. Last we saw Avamar and Citrus. It was a good experience getting to know a bit more of networks.