How I Accidentally Visited a Datacenter

So, some of my friends were looking for a VPS for their research work. High config AWS or GCP is really expensive so they were looking for alternatives. That’s when our professor told them to meet a guy called Mahedi. They dragged me along to meet him and I’m glad that they did.

So Mahedi bhai works at BdREN (Bangladesh Education and Research Network). BdREN connects all the public Universities in Bangladesh through a fiber-optic network and provides fast internet and other cloud services. Despite the project being quite big, I had not heard of it before. I was shocked to hear that I even use their internet (I only knew that my internet connection came from the Registrar building. Never how the registrar building received it). The BdREN office is at the UGC (University Grants Commission) headquarters, Agargaon.

So we meet the guy and have a little chat. He tells us that BdREN can provide free VPS for students of any public universities of Bangladesh. All a student needs is a recommendation from a professor. He gave us the credentials of a VM. We were just about to leave when I curiously asked where is the datacenter of the cloud? He said, “right in the next room. Wanna have a peek?”

Of course!! I don’t remember the last time I was this excited. 😛 He generously gave us a tour around the whole place. Seeing stacks of CPUs and hard disks in an air-conditioned room for the first time was quite the experience.

Here’s me trying to listen in the noise what Mahedi bhai was saying. These were probably the storage racks.

Me in the datacenter

Observation room

In the observation room, there is always a person monitoring the infrastructure 24/7.

We stayed in the datacenter for about an hour. In this short time, Mahadee bhai was generous enough to share some knowledge about computer networks and how their infrastructure worked. I learned new things about networking I didn’t know before. It was about DWDM and optipcal fibers but that deserves another post.

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