What are data centers? How they work and how they are changing in size and scope

 What is the Data Center?

A data center is a facility that centralizes an organization’s shared IT operations and equipment for the purposes of storing, processing, and disseminating data and applications. Because they house an organization's most critical and proprietary assets, data centers are vital to the continuity of daily operations. Consequently, the security and reliability of data centers and their information are among any organization’s top priorities.

Whether a hyper-scale data center with thousands of servers and storage units or a small-scale, regional version: in data centers, servers need to run 365 days per year, seven days per week, and 24 hours per day. Therefore, the prevention of downtime is crucial. It’s all about continuity and keeping your data safe. That’s why both digital and physical security plays an important role.

In the days of the room-sized behemoths that were our early computers, a data center might have had one supercomputer. As equipment got smaller and cheaper, and data processing needs began to increase -- and they have increased exponentially -- we started networking multiple servers (the industrial counterparts to our home computers) together to increase processing power. We connect them to communication networks so that people can access them, or the information on them, remotely. Large numbers of these clustered servers and related equipment can be housed in a room, an entire building, or groups of buildings. Today's data center is likely to have thousands of very powerful and very small servers running 24/7.

Data centers are often referred to as a singular thing, but in actuality, they are composed of a number of technical elements such as routers, switches, security devices, storage systems, servers, application delivery controllers, and more. These are the components that IT needs to store and manage the most critical systems that are vital to the continuous operations of a company. Because of this, the reliability, efficiency, security, and constant evolution of a data center are typically a top priority.

At its simplest, a data center is a physical facility that organizations use to house their critical applications and data. A data center's design is based on a network of computing and storage resources that enable the delivery of shared applications and data. The key components of a data center design include routers, switches, firewalls, storage systems, servers, and application delivery controllers.

What defines a modern data center?

Modern data centers are very different than they were just a short time ago. Infrastructure has shifted from traditional on-premises physical servers to virtual networks that support applications and workloads across pools of physical infrastructure and into a multi-cloud environment.

In this era, data exists and is connected across multiple data centers, the edge, and public and private clouds. The data center must be able to communicate across these multiple sites, both on-premises and in the cloud. Even the public cloud is a collection of data centers. When applications are hosted in the cloud, they are using data center resources from the cloud provider.

The Role of the Data Center

Data centers are an integral part of the enterprise, designed to support business applications and provide services such as:

• Data storage, management, backup, and recovery
• Productivity applications, such as email
• High-volume e-commerce transactions
• Powering online gaming communities
• Big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence

Today, there are reportedly more than 7 million data centers worldwide. Practically every business and government entity builds and maintains its own data center or has access to someone else's, if not both models. Many options are available today, such as renting servers at a colocation facility, using data center services managed by a third party, or using public cloud-based services from hosts like Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, and Google.

Data Center Architecture

Any company of significant size will likely have multiple data centers, possibly in multiple regions. This gives the organization flexibility in how it backs up its information and protects against natural and man-made disasters such as floods, storms, and terrorist threats. How the data center is architected can require some difficult decisions because there are almost unlimited options. Some of the key considerations are:

• Does the business require mirrored data centers?
• How much geographic diversity is required?
• What is the necessary time to recover in the case of an outage?
• How much room is required for expansion?
• Should you lease a private data center or use a co-location/managed service?
• What are the bandwidth and power requirements?
• Is there a preferred carrier?
• What kind of physical security is required?

How do data centers operate?

Data center services are typically deployed to protect the performance and integrity of the core data center components.

Network security appliances. These include firewalls and intrusion protection to safeguard the data center.

Application delivery assurance. To maintain application performance, these mechanisms provide application resiliency and availability via automatic failover and load balancing.

Industry standards

To help IT leaders understand what type of infrastructure to deploy, in 2005, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) published standards for data centers, which defined four discrete tiers with design and implementation guideline. A tier one data center is basically a modified server room, where a tier four data center has the highest levels of system reliability and security.

Why are data centers important to business?

In the world of enterprise IT, data centers are designed to support business applications and activities that include:

• Email and file sharing
• Productivity applications
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Enterprise resource planning (ERP) and databases
• Big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning
• Virtual desktops, communications and collaboration services

Types of data centers

Enterprise data centers:

These are built, owned, and operated by companies and are optimized for their end-users. Most often they are housed on the corporate campus.

Managed services data centers:

These data centers are managed by a third party (or a managed services provider) on behalf of a company. The company leases the equipment and infrastructure instead of buying it.

Colocation data centers:

In colocation ("colo") data centers, a company rents space within a data center owned by others and located off company premises. The colocation data center hosts the infrastructure: building, cooling, bandwidth, security, etc., while the company provides and manages the components, including servers, storage, and firewalls.

Cloud data centers

In this off-premises form of the data center, data and applications are hosted by a cloud services provider such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), or IBM Cloud or other public cloud providers.

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