TGH Data Center

Last Friday I took a tour of the Tampa General Hospital Data Center. its one thing to hear about things in text books, or in film... Its completely another to see them in action. They had huge IBM mainframes, not much changed from the ones in the computer history videos, though the processing power has improved quite a bit. they has a locker for tapes, which looks similar to the mainframe but refrigerated. and then there were racks and racks of servers. I'm also learning alot about this stuff in my Data Communications Class and it was great to see actual core switches and how they were completely redundant, i learned that single mode fiber was yellow and multimode was orange. They had four 56 Tb fiber SAN boxes, which i still don't understand/ or remember exactly what they did, but is alot of storage anyway you look at it. they had 16 Tb( separate) for the imaging racks alone. and probably alot more other storage. Then they also had all the storage in the backup bunker of site. The room was so nice and cool, the device for pushing cool air under the floor and up through vents was huge. and you could feel the vibrations as you walked around. The part that showed how fast stuff is evolving is when we, though VMware we saw how all the servers were virtualized. they have i think it was 11 hosts, but 130 servers. and all of this has happened in only the last 2 years. personally i think a tour like this should be done for all data communication students, and only 10 people went with us on this one. It was quite amazing.