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data center

By Kinza Yasar

What is a data center?

A data center -- also known as a datacenter or data centre -- is a facility composed of networked computers, storage systems and computing infrastructure that organizations use to assemble, process, store and disseminate large amounts of data. A business typically relies heavily on the applications, services and data contained within a data center, making it a critical asset for everyday operations.

Enterprise data centers increasingly incorporate facilities for securing and protecting cloud computing resources and in-house, on-site resources. As enterprises turn to cloud computing, the boundaries between cloud providers' data centers and enterprise data centers become less clear-cut.

How do data centers work?

A data center facility, which enables an organization to collect its resources and infrastructure for data processing, storage and communications, includes the following:

Gathering all these resources in a data center enables the organization to do the following:

Why are data centers important?

Data centers support almost all computation, data storage, and network and business applications for the enterprise. To the extent that the business of a modern enterprise is run on computers, the data center is the business.

Data centers enable organizations to concentrate on the following:

What are the core components of data centers?

Elements of a data center are generally divided into the following primary categories:

What are the types of data centers?

Depending on the ownership and precise requirements of a business, a data center's size, shape, location and capacity may vary.

Common data center types include the following:

What is the infrastructure of a data center?

Small businesses may operate successfully with several servers and storage arrays networked within a closet or small room, while major computing organizations may fill an enormous warehouse space with data center equipment and infrastructure. In other cases, data centers can be assembled in mobile installations, such as shipping containers, also known as data centers in a box, which can be moved and deployed as required.

However, data centers can be defined by various levels of reliability or resilience, sometimes referred to as data center tiers. In 2005, the American National Standards Institute and the Telecommunications Industry Association published standard ANSI/TIA-942, "Telecommunications Infrastructure Standard for Data Centers," which defines four tiers of data center design and implementation guidelines.

Tiers can be differentiated by available resources, data center capacities or uptime guarantees. The Uptime Institute defines data center tiers as follows:

Beyond the basic issues of cost and taxes, sites are selected based on a multitude of criteria, such as geographic location, seismic and meteorological stability, access to roads and airports, availability of energy and telecommunications, and even the prevailing political environment.

Once a site is secured, the data center architecture can be designed with attention to the mechanical and electrical infrastructure, as well as the composition and layout of the IT equipment. All these issues are guided by the availability and efficiency goals of the desired data center tier.

How are data centers managed?

Data center management encompasses the following:

What is data center consolidation?

Modern businesses may use two or more data center installations across multiple locations for greater resilience and better application performance, which lowers latency by locating workloads closer to users.

Conversely, a business with multiple data centers may opt to consolidate data centers, reducing the number of locations in order to minimize the costs of IT operations. Consolidation typically occurs during mergers and acquisitions when the majority business doesn't need the data centers owned by the subordinate business.

Data center vs. the cloud vs. a server farm: What are the differences?

How and where data is stored plays a crucial role in the overall success of a business. Over time, businesses have transitioned from simple on-site server farms and large enterprise data centers to cloud infrastructures.

The key differences among enterprise data centers, cloud service vendors and server farms include the following:

Evolution of data centers

The origins of the first data centers can be traced back to the 1940s and the existence of early computer systems, like the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC. These early machines, which were used by the military, were complex to maintain and operate. They required specialized computer rooms with racks, cable trays, cooling mechanisms and access restrictions to accommodate all the equipment and implement the proper security measures.

However, it was not until the 1990s, when IT operations started to expand and inexpensive networking equipment became available, that the term data center first came into use. It became possible to store all of a company's necessary servers in a room within the company. These specialized computer rooms were dubbed data centers within the organizations, and the term gained traction.

Around the time of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, the need for internet speed and a constant internet presence for companies necessitated bigger facilities to house the large amount of networking equipment needed. It was at this point that data centers became popular and began to resemble the ones described above.

Learn which design best practices organizations are using to build green, sustainable data centers.

25 Apr 2022

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