as well as extensive cooling systems, a control center,
this very question and responded by renting out their
telecommunications, security, and tons of redundancy.
server space, creating Amazon Web Services. They provide
Redundancies are backups of server components includ-
the server backbone for Foursquare, Netflix, and Yelp
ing power supply, network connections, and data storage.
among others, and even host projects for Harvard Medi-
If one source fails, no problem. It’s backed up. “The more
cal School and NASA to run complex analysis models.
redundancies, the better”, says Joe.
Currently, Amazon Web Services owns one-fifth of the
12
Typically, servers follow a “one to many” or model,
where components have at least one backup. Extending
cloud computing market, becoming a major player in providing cloud-based content.13
this concept beyond power supply and data connection, innovations in optimizing and creating redundancy
Epilogue
for data storage, i.e. virtualization, have allowed cloud
This is my basic understanding of how all this works
computing to happen. Depending on who you talk to,
without delving into the infinite details of information
virtualization is an over-arching term that allows us to
technology. I’d like to thank Greg and Joe for talking about
put our data virtually all over the globe and access that
server farms, data centers, and cloud computing. I should
data faster by serving it up locally.
let it be known that we did not talk about nerdy topics for
the entire time, only most of it.
Imagine for a moment you physically divided you
computer’s internal components and placed them at multiple locations around your neighborhood. You still have your keyboard, monitor, and audio jack, but the guts are all over the place. However, this all doesn’t matter to your computer. The operating system (OS) keeps purring along as if nothing happened, and you can merrily go about your day using your computer, accessing your data as if it were all located in one place. This is basically how netbooks or ultrabooks function.
In the world of servers, technology such as storage
area networks (SAN) and redundant array of independent disks (RAID) abstracts where information is held and allows data to be replicated. By spreading the data and traffic load across multiple servers in different locations, data centers optimize their physical real estate. Back in the day, companies overbuilt their servers to make room for data expansion and to protect themselves against large spikes in traffic. I like to think of this method as a giant mall parking lot; every mall has built a parking lot that accounts for the maximum amount of visitors on the biggest shopping day of the year. For the other 364 days, there are scores of spaces being unused.
But why pay for inactive server space? Amazon asked 47