Datacenters: Local and Cloud

0:00So I just got finished with a work trip here. I'm still in Orlando, Florida, but I went to a conference here, and a lot of the emphasis was on Microsoft products and, of course, Azure, as well as other underlying products from Azure, such as Intune, EntryD, what else? Purview, lots of those kinds of things. Anyway, it was astounding to me that a lot of times the presenter would ask for a raise of hands asking how many people were in the cloud.

0:30And there were still a lot of people that did not have presence in the cloud, at least not in any significant way. And a lot of that, I think, comes up from mistrust. In fact, when I was at lunch, I talked to an administrator who's actually from Germany. He's probably about my age, so he's pretty old and experienced in IT. And he said, oh, no, you can't trust the cloud. It's on the internet. Well, wait a minute. Is your own data center also on the internet? Yes. Well, you're also on the internet, so how, you know, the same problem might exist if you're just concerned about being on the internet.

1:03And I think that's one of the paradigm shifts that we as administrators have to face. Now, I do want to point out, what I'm going to show you here in a lot of this skill is not directly coming from the exam objectives of the AB 900 course. The reason why I'm showing you this is because I think some of us need kind of a warmup into the cloud. So we're already all invested in the cloud to some degree, right? I mean, you've got maybe a Dropbox account. If you've got an iPhone like I do, then you're already on, you know, Apple's cloud, iCloud.

1:35Any photo that you take gets uploaded usually automatically to the cloud. So we're all on a consumer level cloud of some type. But when it comes to our servers and data centers and all that stuff, that's when people sometimes get nervous. So we're going to take a look at kind of the paradigm shift here and hopefully get us warmed up to the cloud. So first of all, what do we got going on here? On-premises, okay, what do we have on-premises? Well, all the things you would normally expect to see, right? So we've got servers on-premises. You know, maybe you have a big rack like this, maybe multiple racks, depending on the size of your organization.

2:07In some organizations, the server, quote unquote, I'm trying to fit my air quotes inside of this tiny little circle right here. Anyway, sometimes the server in a small organization might be the computer that's underneath the receptionist's desk. In other places, you might have a server closet. I've been in smaller organizations where we did have a server closet. Wasn't designed as a server room in any way, didn't have adequate ventilation and cooling and stuff like that. And yes, we burned up a server once, at least the hard drives on that server.

2:39It was all we could do though, because it's a long story, but we were in a temporary space while you're waiting to move into a more modern office building. And that was the only place we could do it. Anyway, you may also have your own data center if you're in a larger organization. You might have a space that's rigged specifically for data center purposes. It's got the right cooling. It's got the right power. It's got maybe some security measures also in place. So you might already have all of that. You may have that for your servers. Then you also have, oh my gosh, I just noticed this. This will be fun. Look, I think I can take my head and put it on top of this guy right down here.

3:12Okay, so let's have fun with that one. All right, so anyway, what else have we got going on? So you've got your desktops. Now, to a large degree, and I'm gonna move this back before it drives us all nuts. You're saying your floating head's already driving me nuts, James. Anyway, you may already have your desktops all or partly in the cloud. Now, you can't really honestly put all of your desktops in the cloud because it's kind of an in the name, desktops. It's something that somebody can work on at their desk. But there are desktop solutions actually in the cloud. So for example, imagine you have a small nonprofit and you've got a couple dozen users.

3:48They're all working on computers that were donated and they have, I don't know, two gigs of RAM and an older processor, smaller hard drives, all that kind of stuff. And maybe they don't meet the standard for being able to install something like Windows 11 or maybe even Windows 10. Maybe they're even 32-bit machines, 32-bit processors. Maybe they have CRT monitors. Yeah, I'm not sure how much of a gift this was as a donation from somebody. But anyway, this does happen. Well, how are they gonna get access to modern applications, modern operating systems like Windows?

4:21Well, they're not on that basis. You can't install Windows 11 on something like that, but you can put your desktops in the cloud. So you can have, hopefully I can write this out on this drawing pad, Windows 365. I don't have my normal pen and everything here, so I'm kind of having a hard time writing. But anyway, Windows 365 allows you to connect to a modern Windows 11 machine, regardless almost of what desktop operating system you're running. You can connect from a Mac, from Linux, from anything really that has a browser and or that uses RDP.

4:57So as long as you use the remote desktop protocol or really more accurately, the Microsoft app, it used to be called the remote desktop app, I think, something like that. Now they call it the Microsoft app. Yet another thing that Microsoft has decided to rename and confuse everybody. Anyway, yeah, you could now actually connect to a modern desktop from a really old, crusty computer. Or the other part of that is, maybe you have users working at home. Well, you don't wanna manage everybody's personal computer and you really shouldn't. However, with Windows 365, you can just have everybody connect from their home PC, whatever their operating system is, to their Windows 365 desktop.

5:38It works out really great. Okay, applications, okay? There's another thing that is becoming less and less installed on a local basis. A lot of these applications now are in the cloud. So Salesforce, I think you can install locally still, I think, I haven't really kept up with it. But a lot of that's done in the cloud now. It's a web app, okay? So all you have to do is to open up a browser, go to a specific website, and the whole software runs right from there. Similarly, I used to have a couple of businesses.

6:10I used to run QuickBooks. I used to, in the old days, install QuickBooks on my desktop computer. When an update came out, I had to update it. Now, with QuickBooks, you just open up their website and it's always up to date because they update it. And when you connect to it over a browser, well, there you go, you've got it. Also, our network equipment, okay? So we have to manage that. Maybe you have someone who's a CCNA or in a large organization, you might have CCIE, which is the highest level of network you can get in network equipment, or for Cisco, excuse me.

6:41So that's something that you're gonna be managing from on-premises as well. Now, I do wanna point out, when you move to the cloud, does that mean you don't have any of this stuff? No. Wow, that was ugly. Let's try that again. I was gonna skip it. Anyway, you'll still have some or all of these to varying degrees, but you might be able to transition to the cloud. So a lot of your workload moves to the cloud and you don't have to manage it locally. The other part of this, especially as you get into a little bit of larger organization is, well, you might have a server room, a dedicated server room, or more likely in a bigger enterprise, you'll have a data center of your own.

7:17Well, all of these things, when we run them locally, they get to be a maintenance burden and expensive. So some people look at Azure and all of its associated products that are underneath that Azure umbrella, and it just looks pretty expensive when they start to add things up. Well, you gotta compare that to what you're already paying for. You're already paying for powering all these servers, this whole data center, insurance, maintenance, upkeep. You also have to pay for new equipment when something breaks or when something needs to be updated.

7:50A lot of servers will go about five to seven years before their end of life life cycle is up. And the same is true of desktops. Servers might be able to go a little bit longer, but desktops, at least in terms of the hardware, usually about five to seven years before you cycle them out. But on-premises, as administrators, we're really proud of our data center. We're really proud of our rack of servers over here, and we can put our hands on it. We know what every little blinking light here means, and it gives us a little bit of, I don't know, kind of a warm, fuzzy feeling that we can lay eyes on it and know where everything is and stuff like that.

8:23The cloud is much more nebulous that way. You will know, in general terms, where all your stuff is, okay, where your tenant is, but you're not likely to know exactly which server it's on or even which data center, because Microsoft's data centers are broken up into various regions, and then they're broken up further into availability zones and other stuff, which we can talk about that later. But I'll give you an example. Here in Phoenix, okay, or actually when I'm at home in Phoenix, because I'm not there right now, but in Phoenix, okay, we have, I think it's West 2 or West, I think it's West 3 in Phoenix.

9:01U.S. West 3, I'll just put it that way. Anyway, what does that actually mean in terms of data centers? Well, there's more than one data center. There's kind of Microsoft's main one. It's about, I don't know, 20 or 30 miles from my house, but they also have access to and connection to a couple of other data centers. So when I drop my tenant into U.S. West 3, I don't know if it's gonna be in their main data center or in one of the other parts of the data, parts of U.S. West 3, because there's availability zones there where, you know, if my content is here, you know, that's my, let's just say that's a server or something.

9:37If that fails, well, that's kind of okay because there's a read-only copy replicated to these other areas of the availability zones. So if this one goes down, we can use this one instead. By the way, that's not automatic. You have to configure that. Wish it was automatic, but it's not. Anyway, that's kind of the idea there. Thus, in the next video, we'll go ahead and kind of expand upon that idea and also look at moving from local resources into the cloud, either partially or possibly even entirely.

0:00All right, so let's take a look at a progression here. So maybe you have a smaller company that started to grow and grow and grow, and now you're in a larger office building. Like, let's say that this is your corner office right here. Okay, somebody's corner office. And when they actually want to work with data, maybe they're working on their laptop computer here, the little keyboard down here. They're working on their laptop and they're saving files, right? They're saving files. Then generally the users tend to think of those files being stored on their laptop. And they might be, but very often they're actually stored in a network location.

0:34So it might be a mapped drive that you've created for that user, or you're redirecting their documents if you're doing everything. And we're thinking about all on-prem here, by the way, on-premises. So anyway, that actually gets stored somewhere, doesn't it? Well, in many organizations, if you have, again, you know, like a big office building like that, it looks like it is. If they have their own data center, very often that's going to be on the ground floor. Okay, there's a lot of reasons for that. Part of it is because it's easier to route utilities for the high energy demands that a data center needs. Plumbing, if there's water cooling solutions, that's easier to access.

1:08It's easier to wheel data in or to ship data in and out. There's usually a loading dock somewhere down there as well. So a lot of that server equipment is very heavy. And a lot of the uninterruptible power supplies, or UPSs, are the size of a Volkswagen. And they're just very big and heavy. And so that's another reason why, because usually a ground floor can support more weight like that. Okay, so anyway, because again, a lot of them weigh more than a car. So anyway, yeah, now we're storing stuff. It's all down here in our data center on-premises.

1:40Now, as time goes by, maybe we've expanded out into branch offices. So maybe we have Phoenix here. I'm actually getting the hang of working with this drawing pad I've been working with lately. And then maybe down here, we've expanded to a different office. Okay, so maybe we have a branch office here in Albuquerque. We say branch office, but it's still a sizable office. We have another one over here, let's say, in Denver. And if you're not from the US, Phoenix is in Arizona. Albuquerque is very difficult to spell, which makes it easy to put the airport code up there, which is ABQ. That's in New Mexico, next to Phoenix, next to Arizona.

2:11And then Denver is over here in Colorado. Okay, so anyway, now what do we have going on? Well, now we have to have some kind of a link, right? So maybe this is our link between these offices. I'll just draw this one in differently here. So we've got some kind of network link there. And, you know, in the old days, we used to have dedicated links. I'm not saying those don't exist anymore, but they're very expensive. So very often nowadays, these organizations will just use internet, okay? And the initial feeling there, the knee-jerk reaction is, oh, that's not secure. Well, it can be made secure, because you can do something like a site-to-site VPN or other kinds of solutions that will encrypt and protect that network traffic.

2:51So anyway, that's very often how that is gonna be. And very often, data will be synchronized from Phoenix to one or both of these other branch offices. And one reason for that is because we also want some redundancy. What if here in Phoenix, it's 115 degrees outside, and the air conditioning totally blows out in this building, and we have, you know, these flames coming out of our servers and everything down here. So now, that's messed up, and we can't rely on that data center right now. And of course, I'm just making up a situation, but there's all kinds of things that can happen.

3:23We don't really have many natural disasters, but I guess something could happen. So what we can do is we can kind of flip the switch and start to access our data in Albuquerque. Now, of course, there's a lot of underlying pre-planned measures to make that happen, and, you know, things like clusters and failover and all that kind of stuff. But anyway, regardless, we have that capability now. We have a layer of safety in being able to depend upon these replicated locations. Now, it's not all just replication. It could be a lot of other things as well, but the point is we have now data there, and we also have data over here in Denver as well.

3:58So the organization continues to grow. So we can't expand. Let me kind of back some of this out. We can no longer expand our data center. So down here in Phoenix, we filled up our data center on that ground floor. That's one reason why maybe we had to open up a branch office, not just for the data center, but for a business expansion. Same with Denver. Now, these offices also are continuing to grow and need to support our users and our customers and whatever else we have in our business. Well, if we cannot expand those anymore, then what do we do? Well, we can move into co-location facilities, okay?

4:31What's a co-location facility? You might be doing that for all of our offices here. A colo is another data center. That's all it really is. It's just, and in Phoenix, where I live, we've had a proliferation of them. There must have been, I can count four or five, five different data centers that have been built in the last two years, and they're gigantic. But what's the advantage of using a data center from a third party as opposed to having your own? First of all, who wants to pay to build your own data center, a freestanding data center in a separate building like data centers usually are?

5:05Well, not me. Those are millions of dollars in expense and exorbitantly expensive for most organizations. So what do we do? We lease some space there, okay? So we're gonna lease a little bit of space in one or all of these data centers. And then we'll take our server racks, like we saw in our last video here. And to give you a little bit of sense of scale, this guy's probably about the right height for a data center. I think these are usually 73 inches high, somewhere around there, 42 inches from front to back, and the width is usually 24 inches.

5:35If I'm off by an inch or two, I think that's generally right though. So that gives you an idea of the size of these server racks. So now in these data centers, very often what you could do is you can just wheel in or ship to or wheel in your own rack, like I just showed you on the previous slide there. You can take that rack and drop it into this data center somewhere. Drop it into, it sounds like you airdrop it. You don't wanna do that, but usually there'll be a loading dock, you can put it in there. And IT staff from your company can go into that data center and there's gonna be badged access and security and all kinds of things, of course, because you need to protect your clients if you own that data center, right?

6:12So this is now called co-location or sometimes we just call it colo. So we have a rack in that data center that we're leasing, we're leasing that space and we're leasing the utilities that supply it indirectly, you know, the electricity, the air conditioning, the physical security that's involved there and everything. So we're taking advantage of that whole co-location facilities resources and we're just renting out one, enough space to put our rack in, okay? Usually your own staff will be able to go in and out of there as they please, and they can only touch or manage their own rack of servers.

6:49They're carefully monitored and no one should be able to touch anything else there, okay? And then here's a representation of a data center. You can see the racks are in here and everything. They're, you know, really nice, pretty lighting and everything like that. That's the kind of thing you might see in a data center. Under here, underneath this are usually raceways that you can route cables and potentially other utilities and stuff like that. Some of them have them up in the ceiling instead, but anyway, that gives you an idea for what those might look like when they're actually installed and in place. Here's another one here. This looks like a lot of hard drives in this one, if I'm looking at that right.

7:21And that again is something else you'll have there is there a lot of storage in these racks sometime, terabytes and terabytes of storage. And then this is my favorite data center here. I don't actually know where this is. It is an actual photograph. It's not an AI thing or something like that, but you see again here, there's a, it looks like network equipment. I think that's network equipment up there. It's hard to tell with the reflection on the glass. Servers back here, it looks like there's a lot of storage down here at the bottom of this one as well. Anyway, that's the kind of thing you might have in one of these data centers. So what did we do here? Well, we started in one location, right?

7:53We started right there, right here. Let me get a better color that's more visible there. Anyway, we started right there and our company grew and we moved into a data center and we created a data center and we had branch offices. They had data centers and then everything kind of got to be too big for all of that. And so then we had to start using co-location services and it's not all because of growth. Sometimes it's just a good idea for things like redundancy and other reasons. But anyway, what have we actually done here? By the time we get here especially, we've kind of built our own cloud, right?

8:24So you have already been in the cloud if you've been in a situation like this. You don't control this co-location center, okay? You're just leasing space down there. That's what happens when you're in the cloud. You're leasing, if you will, resources in our case, Microsoft's cloud. And anyway, I set that all up just as kind of a overall guidance on moving into the cloud and kind of hopefully opening up a little bit more of a comfortable feeling about doing that because in certain ways, many of us have already been doing the cloud, maybe without realizing it.

0:00All right, now I'm going to refer you to this website. I've also linked it down below, so you can kind of explore around on this on your own. This is actually really cool. This is something that Microsoft makes available to us, so you can kind of get a comprehensive look at what's going on with their cloud, right? So this will show things such as actual data centers, power generation, they're trying to get to a more, what do you call it, carbon neutral energy footprint. Right now, they're at about 70%.

0:30And you can see, actually, if you look at the legend, there's a legend here, this shows sustainability projects, okay? So with wind, solar, and mixed, okay? So in my area, if I zoom in a little bit, I think you can lose these little zoomy things. This is my area right down here where I live in Phoenix. It's West US 3. That's about 20, probably 20 or 30 miles from my own house. If you click on it, it actually shows it to you over here. That's the skyline for where I live. Looks like it was taken from Papago Peak, maybe, or maybe Camelback Mountain.

1:02Anyway, doesn't matter. Gives you a little bit of information about that particular location. Now, one thing I want to point out is that when you first set up your tenant, if it's not already set up, you have to tell Microsoft where you want it to be located. This is not something that is very easily moved. So yes, you'll have redundancies in other locations if you want, but your initial choice has to be a pretty solid decision here. I would not want to set it up in West US 3 and then tomorrow decide to send it in Central US or East US or something like that.

1:37So these were set up in terms of geography, which you can kind of think of geography as the overall main continent here, okay? So United States is one of the geographies. There's also Europe, okay? That's a geography. What else have we got? Asia, I guess Asia's over here, okay? So Asia's a geography. Getting back to the US, which I'm the most familiar with, you'll see that they have, I was talking about energy, they have sun streams here. What is that? I don't know, solar, I guess, okay? And that kind of gives you a visual representation of that sort of thing. There's also wind farms like right here.

2:09Okay, so anyway, that's how they're supporting that sort of thing. Also notice that there is these interconnected undersea cables that go worldwide. This is huge. I just saw a YouTube video on not just Microsoft undersea cables, but from a lot of organizations. It's quite a fascinating thing to look at here. Someone was saying in the video that trillions of dollars transit these cables every, I think he said every hour. I guess that's in relation to transactions, banking, all that kind of stuff, and overall value of the websites that are connected.

2:42They also used to have, they changed this whole thing here, but they used to show satellites orbiting the earth here. Because I guess Microsoft also has satellite connections that they can use. Maybe they're trying to hide the fact that they have a mothership up there somewhere, then they took out those satellites. Anyway, this gives you an idea of how interconnected Microsoft is. Look, there's only a few places in the world where they don't have a presence. There's not that much presence here in Africa. Okay, I guess they got a couple of points of presence here and there, and then there's their main one in South Africa.

3:17Pretty much nothing in all of Russia. Big surprise there. They do have some in China though. So anyway, you get the idea there on what's going on. So these again are broken down into several categories. First of all, there's the geography again, pretty much a continent or a country in general, and then it's broken down into a smaller area. Like within the US, there's East US, there's South Central US. What's this one? West Central US. This was the first, no, that's not the first one. This was the first one. West US over here in the Los Angeles area, if I'm not mistaken.

3:50And one thing that's important is when you choose the location, you have to know what it supports. So if you chose West US, for example, you go down here, notice that there are no availability zones here. I'll talk to you about that again in a moment, but that's a way that you can kind of fail over if there is a problem that occurs. Also, not all data centers, not all, excuse me, not all regions will support all industry compliances. Now here, we've got quite a few. Okay, there's all of these different ones, but there's also some missing.

4:21So there's no GDPR, which is a European standard. You might still have to support GDPR even if you're in the United States, as long as you do business in the EU. So you have to look out for that sort of thing. What are the kinds of compliances that they fall under? Anyway, if we get off of that one and go to another one like the one in Phoenix, you'll see here that we do have availability zones with three total availability zones. So let's talk about what an availability zone is. An availability zone is, let's take a look at Phoenix here that I'm already on.

4:54There's kind of the main data center. I don't know if Microsoft would call it that, but we'll call it that for the time being, like a main data center. And then there are other physical data centers, usually within just a few miles of the first one. So I think one of the data centers they have is in the downtown area. And then sometimes other data centers will be separated by just a few miles. One of the data centers I saw, I can't remember where it was, it looked like it was just maybe three or four miles away from the first data center. And that again, is sort of something where to go wrong with our first location for our data or resources, then we could fail over to another location, another part of the availability zone.

5:33And that's for high availability, of course. Okay, now the next thing I'll point out just real quick here, Microsoft has already concluded the project I'm about to show you. So it's not current right now, but it could spark up again in the future. And that would be this, Project Natic, I think is how they pronounced it, N-A-T-I-C-K. They had a data center. Actually, let me refresh the page. I think it shows it coming up out of the water or something like that. I guess not. Anyway, oh yeah, there it is. They have a data center, it's about the size of a small submarine, I guess, underwater off the coast of Scotland.

6:06And what they're doing there is they're taking advantage of the cold seawater on the ocean floor to cool that data center. I don't know how they circulated the water and made it cool and everything, but they figured out a way. Obviously, it's watertight, and it doesn't have any oxygen in there. So as you might've guessed, also, it's unmanned. There's no people in there. And they actually pumped out all the oxygen, filled it up full of nitrogen, because oxygen can contribute to things like corrosion and stuff like that.

6:37And the human element also contributes to certain failures. So people bumping into things, accidentally disconnecting things, stuff like that. Like I said, the project's concluded now, but it was on the ocean floor for two years before they brought it back up. Oh, I think that's the manager guy right there, if I recognize that guy correctly. Yeah, there's him there, I think. Anyway, really cool project. It had a big power line that went right to it. This is how they dropped it into the ocean. And this is what it looks like when you roll out the data center out of the shell.

7:08Okay, so this is called the payload, where all the servers are. And this is called the shell, the actual housing. What I found was kind of funny was, you would think there would be some kind of motorized, automated way for them to roll it in and out. No, what they use is they use these big hand cranks with come-alongs, and they just had to take a big lever and just, you know, on a chain, and just pull the whole thing into the shell. But yeah, there's all the servers and everything. You can see the, looks like cooling. That's probably where the cooling is right there. I don't know for sure, I'm just guessing. Yeah, because those look like radiated fins, like from an air conditioner or a heat sink.

7:41So they might've pumped the water in through there. But anyway, regardless, there it is. And look, it must've been a great success because look how happy this guy is. Here's another article on it. That's not a Microsoft employee, by the way, unless it's one of those guys that just stands around and watches other people work. Guess here they're blasting all the barnacles off of it. And there's the quaint little Scottish town right up here in the hills. Fun fact, I was actually born in Scotland. Anyway, oh yeah, I like this picture right here. It kind of reminds me of the amount of closet space my wife gives me. By the way, if any of you were OCD, do you see anything here that might bother you?

8:15Yeah, sure bothered me, look at this. That sticker was crooked like that for two years on the bottom of the ocean floor. They should've sent divers down there to fix that, but they didn't, cheapskates. Anyway, of course I'm being facetious, or am I? Anyway, enough of that. In the next video, I'm gonna just take you on a little tour of Microsoft Data Center. And it's also something you can do yourself, and I'll put the links for all that down below. Actually, it links right from here. We'll go right here next. We're gonna go to take a tour in the Microsoft Data Center.

0:00All right, let's get back to our discussion of data centers. So, by the way, I don't know why the earth is all gray and carbon looking here. It must have been scorched earth or something like that. The other thing I want to point out, though, was I forgot to mention this in the previous video. Microsoft says that the failure rate for the servers that were in that undersea data center were only one-eighth as bad as something that would be on a land-based data center. Usually, Microsoft offers five nines, which is 99.99, actually four nines, 99.99% uptime.

0:35It's not a guarantee that they'll be up that much, but if they fail and it exceeds that failure rate, then they will somehow compensate you. I don't know. So let's go ahead and take a tour. Okay, so we're going to look at the Microsoft Data Center. And I click right there and you can do the same as well. Links should be down below if you want to follow along for yourself. And here we go. So there's actually a couple of websites that Microsoft has that makes this available. I'm not sure if there's really much difference between any of it. And somehow if I move my mouse pointer around, there's a little light that follows it also.

1:06Maybe we're under spotlights for surveillance or something. But it shows a checkpoint. As you can imagine, when you drive up, you have to get past the security guard at the front gate, right? We'll talk about that later on, I think, in another video further down in this course. So physical security is critical. There's a perimeter fence. I don't know if Microsoft has them, but some data centers also have armed guards. Also, in the global data centers that I showed you in the globe that was previously there, not all the data centers appear there, by the way.

1:37There are some government ones that don't appear on that map and that are deliberately obscured. I think one of them in Arizona is in Camp Verde. I'm probably not supposed to know that, but anyway. They also do a lot of recycling there. In fact, I just learned this this past week. I knew they disposed of their hard drives. When the hard drive fails, they have to dispose of it somehow. And I knew that there were machines that they used to kind of grind them up, but I didn't realize how much. Apparently, they're essentially ground up to virtually powder when they have a failed hard drive.

2:08And then that's recycled somehow. I don't know how they do that, but anyway. Here's their carbon usage goal right here. You know, sustainable, renewable energy and the like. Now let's go ahead and get into the lobby. So first thing I want to point out, when it comes to entering the lobby, it looks like you can use an AI assistant here as well. That's new. That wasn't there last time I was here. Anyway, you can see there's this very friendly person behind the glass, ready to greet you. Now, I did learn some other things this past week about this whole process, because I talked to one of the people that's toured a Microsoft data center.

2:42I think he toured the one in Dublin. He's Irish. And in other news, he also said that they had to put a hard stop on further expansion of data center in the Dublin area in Ireland, because they're consuming all the electricity in that area and rolling brownouts are becoming a thing there. So I guess they better get onto that sustainability energy a little faster. But in order to even get in here, you have to sign three contracts. You have to pass a background check. There are multiple doorways for two-factor authentication.

3:14So that's actually, they're talking about the man trap over here is what he was talking about. You have to have a physical key, which requires a work ticket of some kind. And when you go in and when you exit, by the way, none of that information is in this tour that I'm showing you right here. When you enter, you are weighed. Yeah, they'll take your weight. So you might wanna skip breakfast on that date. And then they also weigh you on the way out. You can probably understand why. They want to know if you brought something in and you're suddenly lighter when you come back out so that you might've deposited something in there that you shouldn't have.

3:46And they wanna make sure that you're not walking out with something that you shouldn't have. Some, I don't know, hard drive or whatever. So yeah, pretty stringent security there, folks. But these man traps here, which are also known as security vestibules. I guess man trap sounds a little bit too much like some kind of nightclub or something like that. Anyway, these security vestibules, if you know how those work, there are two doors. First of all, you have to pass some kind of security measure to get into the first door. A lot of times it's to buy, I don't know how it is at Microsoft, but a lot of times it's a biometric, like a fingerprint or an iris scan, something like that.

4:21They used to do cornea, not corneas, retinal scans. But as people age, the retina actually does change a little bit. So they've now gone to iris scans in a lot of locations and you might have to have a pin. So there's two factors of authentication that go on there. Most data centers, you also have to be visually observed by a guard. Like, I don't know if she's a guard or not. I don't know if that's her role there, but that's similar to what could happen there. Then once you're inside of there, you may have to pass another security measure before the second door opens. And if you fail, then they will trap you in there until security comes, okay?

4:54What else we got here? Looks like a nice little break room over there, okay? We don't want to explore that. But anyway, we'll go into the operations room. I did learn, and you can look at that if you want to, but I did learn that most of these data centers only have about 14 employees that run the data center. Of course, there's other people that do things like maintenance and, I don't know, cleaning or groundskeeper. There's the security guard and all that stuff. But I mean, the actual data center doing IT stuff, there's usually only about 14 people that run that whole thing. Anyway, you can see how everything's measured here. They do have lots of sensors.

5:25I'll talk to you about that later on in the course. But they have a staggering amount of sensors that determine things like temperature and failures of various types and electrical consumption and that kind of thing. Anyway, there's little dots you can click on throughout here. I'm not going to exhaust all of those. AI is, of course, becoming a big thing worldwide. There's also a video you can play here where someone will talk to you about what goes on here. But anyway, let's go into the mechanical area. I'm not going to really fully explore this. This is all just things like your chillers or coolers, your power, all that sort of thing.

5:58Okay, so these are the coolers over here, I think. Cooling, right. And then this is the power over here on the right. But we're going to enter the server room. We're going to get right there. That's where all the good stuff is. Now, one thing I'll point out real quick here about Microsoft's server room is that it is just almost famously boring, okay. Compare this server room. And by the way, this looks better than the previous version I saw. But it's not very colorful, not a lot of decorative LEDs and stuff like that. Compare that to the Google data centers.

6:29And look how happy these Google employees are. They must like working there. That's not showing what I thought it was going to show. Okay, here we go. Look how colorful their data centers are. Wow, wouldn't you rather work at Google than at Microsoft? Look at these. Oh my gosh, these are beautiful. But there's actually a good reason for them being boring as well. Microsoft wants to commit all their resources to actual productivity. One of the people I heard talk about this last week said that they can stand these data centers up in an amazingly fast period of time.

6:59And of course, there's got to be permits and all that stuff. All the red tape is different than what I'm talking about here. But the actual shovel, shovel in the dirt to standing up the data center can take place, I think they said in eight months. And they don't do a lot of fancy stuff here. In fact, a lot of the bolts that connect a lot of the external steel structure, they don't even trim off the bolts. They just leave everything that way, okay? But what I want to get to here is to show you some of the server blades. So Microsoft designs their own server blades. This is just a bunch of disk blades.

7:31That's what JBOD is, just a bunch of disks in there for mass storage. They have typically used a lot of hard disk drives in the past, especially for things like cold storage or storage that doesn't have to be readily available quite as fast, okay? For hot data, they'll usually put that on SSDs. That's transitioning. Why? Well, a couple of reasons. Number one, hard disk drives are traditionally larger in size than SSDs. So that's one reason why they were favored there, just a higher density of data. But SSDs are catching up.

8:02You're starting to get more density out of SSDs than we've had in the past. But the overriding factor there really is power consumption. A hard disk drive with spinning platters uses a lot more energy than an SSD. Even though SSDs are more expensive, that gap is also shrinking. Anyway, that's a JBOD blade. That's what that one looks like. And then this would be one of their compute blades, which has the processor and RAM and all that stuff on it, and the motherboard. Microsoft does not buy these off the shelf from Dell or Lenovo or whoever, or HP.

8:35They actually design their own systems, and then they outsource them to have one of those companies make them for them. And they're unique and proprietary just to Microsoft. I don't know how my scrolling got all weird, but anyway. You can explore that a little bit further on your own as well. This one's a new one, Azure Maya. It's funny, I read that as Azure Mafia when I first saw it. For all I know, the Gambino family's controlling this whole data center. I'm going to go here into the circular center, and this is where a lot of the backend stuff takes place here as well.

9:08I don't really see any here. Probably it's in a different area. But they also have in the telecommunications area, or the network room, there it is. Let's just go in there. Yeah, here it is. Notice how boring this looks. Again, there are a lot sexier data centers in the world than what Microsoft has, but they get the job done. This is plywood on the wall. It's even a special kind of plywood. I wonder if this says anything about it. Oh yeah, this plywood is treated with special coating that does not release particulates for controlling dust.

9:38Wow, I guess they didn't get that at Home Depot. Anyway, I'll leave the rest to you. There's a lot of different little buttons and little dots here that you can click on to get some interesting information. But if you're new to the cloud, new to Microsoft data centers, this might get you a long ways into understanding what it's capable of.

0:00All right, so let's summarize some of the things we looked at in terms of Microsoft's data center with really a discussion of Azure. So, Azure is an umbrella term. It's Microsoft's total cloud that they use for organizations. So, this will include a lot of different sub-products, if you will. So, if you just have Azure, you don't really have much. It's like having a toolbox with no tools in it, okay? You have to put tools inside. One of those would be something like Entra ID, which is probably the most foundational part of this. It used to be called Azure Active Directory.

0:34Then they changed it to Entra ID. I think there was actually another name before all of this as well. But anyway, now it's called Entra ID. That's where your identity is for things like your user accounts and groups and certain other things. But primarily, it's for identity, as the name kind of implies there. There's also Intune, which is another significant part of Azure. This is the mechanism that you can use, the cloud-based mechanism, to manage your devices. So, things that we used to do on-premises in Active Directory, such as work with group policy objects.

1:09The group policy objects can largely be replaced by what Intune can do. It can do most, if not, well, I don't want to say all of it, most of what group policy objects used to be able to do. And it can also replace a lot of what we did in System Center, which is also known as System Center Configuration Manager, or Configuration Manager, or ConfigMan, or CM. That's gone through another bunch of changes in terms of the terminology or names that we all refer to it as. But anyway, CM, Config Manager, is all on-premises. Of course, Intune would be in the cloud. And there are many other products, Defender, XDR, Purview, Sentinel. Those are just a few that come to mind right off hand. But gosh, there's a ton of products underneath the Azure cloud. Now, we looked at the data centers in our previous nugget here, previous video. There are over 400 of those data centers, and they're still growing. They're still building them. And 70 different regions. This does not really touch directly on what we do, other than the fact that we use AI. However, Microsoft is huge in the AI data center capacity now. Anytime you use Copilot, that's part of their AI. That's their engine. They have dedicated two gigawatts for AI data center capacity. So how much is two gigawatts?

2:29That is enough flip-the-switch power. In other words, how much available power there is at any given moment. It's enough to power one and a half million homes, or a medium-sized city. That's how much that is. It's an enormous energy requirement for that. Anyway, I just threw that in there. As I mentioned before, they're looking at 70% renewable energy and improving that. There's 165,000 plus miles of fiber optic or subsea optic cable to transmit data. And I think I heard this past week that it's terabits worth of bandwidth that they have there. There's about a billion users supported in Azure, with millions of organizations involved. In other words, millions of customers, if you will. Microsoft invests about a billion dollars annually in cybersecurity and infrastructure resilience. And I expect that really to kind of grow as well.

3:30And remember we talked about some compliance earlier, like GDPR, HIPAA is another one, Sabine's Oxley, some other stuff like that. All of those regulatory government requirements, there's about 90 compliance certs that Microsoft possesses across their data centers. And so that is Microsoft Azure kind of in a nutshell, but there's a lot more to that, which we'll explore as we continue on.

0:01And finally, let's take a look at a good justification for using something like Microsoft's Cloud. And again, you know, really, it doesn't have to be only Microsoft's Cloud because there's a lot of other clouds out there for different purposes. Amazon Web Services or AWS. VMware has a cloud, although it doesn't serve the same purpose. Google, that's another one that is possibly in some ways a competitor to Microsoft's Cloud, although I would have to say that on scale and when you look at feature per feature, probably Microsoft is definitely the leader there.

0:33And that's not a bias of any kind. That's just really the way it is. But let's take a look at how things work. So let's say that you have a business and your business is in sports memorabilia and you sell those little sports figure bobbleheads. Have you seen the bobbleheads? They have a lot for baseball, but I think they have them for football as well. These players and they're on a little body. There's a big head on a little body. It kind of goes like this. It bounces back and forth like this on a spring, just like that. Okay, that was a pretty good imitation, I thought.

1:04Anyway, so maybe that's your business and this is how it looks most of the year. So these are the dollar sales that you make and these are the months of the year. Now you'll see why I'm going to do this in a moment, but we're going to start our fiscal year in April. That'll just make it easier. So we have April, May, June, July, August, September, October, so forth until we get to Super Bowl season. So in Super Bowl season, we kind of would expect our sales to really get up there.

1:36So we'd have February and March right here, okay? So most of the year, our sales are just kind of, eh, they're okay. They're not that great, but they're okay. And then when it comes to Super Bowl season, and especially when you have a winner for the Super Bowl, the sales go, wing, like this. Now everybody wants whatever the bobblehead is for the star quarterback or whoever in football. And yes, I'm talking about American football, also known as the real football. That other thing is actually just soccer.

2:07All right, I've lost half my audience right now, haven't I? But you get the point. So we have demand that is not consistent all year round. A lot of businesses are like this. Another thing you can think of there is Christmas season. Okay, the holiday season, where again in usually December or maybe November, Black Friday, those sales shoot through the roof. And then after Christmas and after all the returns come in, in January, everything goes back down again, right?

2:37So let's say that in our company, we hit this time of year last year and our servers crashed. They could not handle the load and we lost a lot of business. It was a professional embarrassment. Everyone went to a competitor. And so I took our, I'm pretending I'm the person here. I took our CEO and our CFO and our CIO and all the C-suite. I took them to an expensive lunch at Arby's and I sat down and I drew out on the little paper mat on our trays there how much money we lost and the value of buying a really beefy server to handle all of this, okay?

3:20Now, yes, there's a lot of things that fall through in the analogy, okay? In a real life situation, we're not going to have a server, a single server to handle all this, but we're going to pretend as if we do, right? So I was able to finally convince them. They said, all right, fine. Have it your way, James. You can buy an expensive server. So what I do is I go to Dell and I look up a rack server. I say, oh, this server will do it pretty well. It starts at only $12,000. Well, I was kind of fiddling around with this earlier and I'll be honest, I just started throwing money at it.

3:52I just started check boxing things that looked expensive just to kind of make a point here, okay? So anyway, I added a bunch of stuff on there, more processors, more memory, all kinds of stuff. And so I'm not even done yet. And it racked up $33,906, $34,000 essentially. And like I said, I just started picking expensive stuff. This is why they don't let me manage the servers at CBT Nuggets. I get carried away, folks. Anyway, so we got a $33,000 to $34,000 investment now.

4:23And this year, when Super Bowl season came around again, we didn't have a crash because we were able to meet the demand using my fancy new expensive server, okay? The executives were pleased and everything. However, when it came time for our semi-annual report, what would that be, in June or July? Right here, the executives wanted to know, how much were we using that fancy server we bought you? Oh, well, you know, we're really only using 15% of its total capacity here from April through July.

4:56It's only been 15%. 15%? You mean you spent $34,000 on a server and we're only using 15% of it? Well, yeah, but it's because I didn't want it to crash again in February. Well, they might not like that, that this is largely wasted server resource utilization, this whole area right here, most of the time. Now, any reasonable executive would understand how that scales and the importance of that, but not all executives are reasonable, are they?

5:27And I can't just go to Dell and say, hey, you know what? That fancy server you sold me last year, turns out we only used it 15% capacity most of the year. So can you give us back the 85% that we didn't really use? Nope, they're not going to do that, are they? Same as if you buy a steak at a restaurant and you only eat half of it, they don't give you 50% of your purchase back. Believe me, I've tried. Now, this is really where something like Azure can be useful. Because in Azure, what you can do is you can build virtual machines in the cloud.

5:57So now, again, this is our sales, and these are the months over here, and I'm not going to draw in all the months, but you get the idea. So we're like this most of the year, and then in February and March, whoop, way up there. What we can do in Azure with the virtual machines we build there is we can do something called scaling up or scaling out, either way. Scaling up means that we just add more resources. So let's say that this virtual machine that we're using in Azure has, I don't know, four gigs of RAM, one CPU, something like that.

6:32Well, we can set it up, and this can be automated, by the way, so that it triggers within, oh, maybe a couple minutes even. When our sales start to climb, then it can automatically add two CPUs, four CPUs, whatever. It can add eight gigabytes of RAM, 16 gigs of RAM. However much we need, it can scale it up within our parameters. And then when we're done, when March has come and gone and we've sold out of bobbleheads, it goes back down. Then it just goes right back to what we had in the first place.

7:03And we don't pay for the excess server resources that we're not using. That's a big factor when it comes to Azure resources. And that's scaling up. By the way, just since I already mentioned it, scaling out would mean that we just take that server, this first original server here, and we just add another one. So we have another server now that's four gigabytes and one CPU. I'm running out of room. But anyway, you get the idea. You can add, scale out to two servers, scale out to three servers, however many you need. It's all kind of dependent upon your goals and everything.

7:34Anyway, that's another good reason to be able to use Azure resources for things like that. And that's just kind of a short list. There's a lot more involved than just those reasons. And, in fact, I'll have to say, those of you that are accustomed to on-premises Active Directory, Microsoft will probably still support it for a long time. I'll mention this again later in the course as well. But their plan right now is they really don't want people being on Active Directory. I mean, it's been around since 2000. It's already been around 25 years.

8:04It does have some security exploits that really have never been fully resolved. And Microsoft is strongly encouraging everyone to move their identity, especially, into the cloud.