I mentioned in my May 19 blog post that I visited Fudan University on my recent trip to China. Before too much time passes (and my memory fades), I want to write about my experience there. The university is a Sun customer, so they gave me a tour of their datacenter. And let me just say that I was blown away.

Now, when I visit customers, they routinely take me on these tours. And as you might expect, computers, tape drives, raised flooring and other datacenter features look pretty much the same from datacenter to datacenter, no matter where you are in the world. So when I was escorted into Fudan University's datacenter, my expectations weren't high.

The first thing I noticed was the large bank of monitors. Half were monitor systems for network activities; highlighted in red, like a giant traffic map, were any problems in the thousands of computers that Fudan has spread across its campuses and that are all managed from this central location. (The university IT staff wrote all the monitoring software themselves using open source software.) The other half of the monitors show feeds from video surveillance cameras aimed at the key computing assets around the campuses.

My guides opened the door to the main computer room to proudly display the Sun systems that run the university. They then took me through another set of doors so they could show me massive banks of batteries or UPS systems that protect the main computer room in the event of a power outage. They explained that the computer center actually has power feeds from two different power plants, and they showed me the two massive breakers.

Then my guides did something I've never seen done before: they shut off the breakers to give me a live demonstration of the UPS system working. (After this, they opened one more set of doors and I half expected that they would open into the power plants themselves, but instead it was the fire suppression system room.)

In the end, it was not only one of the most sophisticated datacenters I've seen at a university anywhere in the world—it also rivaled many of the corporate datacenters I've seen.