Title: - DTU Data Center Visiting Your Name: - Henok Mesfin ID - NO: - 71/10
Title: - DTU Data Center Visiting Your Name: - Henok Mesfin ID - NO: - 71/10
Our visiting stared in the afternoon at 2:30PM. The first person we find there was Mr. Facil who
is a Network Administrator and IT Expert for Debre Tabor University. Mr. Facil gave us a tour
to the datacenter. Our first visit was at a two rack-mounted servers’ room where the current
system is implemented, in this room we sawed how the servers are configured and wired, for
instance the ISP(Ethio-Tele) cable which is known as fiber optics cable is connected or welded to
a patch panel which has 12 cores and for the internet purpose only one core is used, this pass
core cable is connected to the Firewall, were often used as a barrier between a trusted and
untrusted network and the firewall is known as Fortinet Firewall. This firewall connects to router
and filters all traffic before it gets distributed throughout the campus network. And the firewall is
wired with routers/Multi-Layer-Switch this router/multilayer switch have a NAT (Network
Address Translation) which helps to assign a private IP address to each device that connects to
the network and also helps to translate private IP addresses to public when a user needs to
connect to the internet. Multi-Layer Switch is a device which act as a switch when a switch is
needed and as a router when a router is needed.
The Firewall and Multi-Layer Switches DTU Datacenters
The other device we sawed in the server room is the Wireless LAN Controller (WLC), this
device is used to manage wireless access points and out-door access point that allow wireless
device to connect to the network, the main task that WLC is needed is for seamless connection
for devices when they are changing from one access point to the other and one other thing is, it is
used to configure the access point like for example in the case of DTU there are about three
access points available in the campus (DTU-STUDENTS, DTU-STAFFS, DTU-GUESTS).
UCS (Unified Computing System) is the other device we sawed. Mr. Facil told as that UCS are
device that are used for wireless security purpose and that it is not implemented on the datacenter
architecture of DTU.
Unified Computing System (UCS)
Our final visit to this room was to the servers, these servers are basically three and two servers
were Dell brand and one server was a Mac server. The first server was used to store students’
grade and the second Dell server is used to perform task that a Lecturers submit students’ grade.
The Mac server were used during Covid Pandemic period for students to access E-resources
from the platform provided.
Dell-server
Mac-server
The second rack is for redundancy purpose, where it serves as when system failure occurs it will
replace the first rack. This server room also contains AC that maintains the temperature of the
room for efficient and effective performance of the servers. The last device we sawed there is a
UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) which supports the datacenter to maintain its power when
there is a fluctuation of power. This UPSs has several batteries that take over when it detects a
loss or reduction of available power.
Discussion
A fruitful visit we had in the datacenter of Debre Tabor University which helped as to know
what a datacenter might look like and what components are included in the datacenter and
how devices are configured and the task that a device performs in a datacenter.
Conclusion
A Data Center have a huge impact on the world we live in. As we are leaving and heading to
the digital world, the impact of building a world class datacenter has a huge impact for the
university community as well in the learning teaching process because the future learning
teaching process would be expected to be in virtual, apart from that it is one step ahead for
the university to advance in newly coming technology.
Reference
1.datacenteracademy.microsoft.com/