A data center is a physical room, building or facility that houses IT infrastructure for building, running, and delivering applications and services, and for storing and managing the data associated with those applications and services.
Data centers have evolved in recent years from privately-owned, tightly controlled on-premises facilities housing traditional IT infrastructure for the exclusive use of one company, to remote facilities or networks of facilities owned by cloud service providers housing virtualised IT infrastructure for the shared use of multiple companies and customers.
There are different types of data center facilities, and a single company may use more than one type, depending on workloads and business needs.
In this data center model, all IT infrastructure and data is hosted on-premises. Many companies choose to have their own on-premises data centers because they feel they have more control over information security, and can more easily comply with regulations such as the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). In an enterprise data center, the company is responsible for all deployment, monitoring, and management tasks.
Cloud data centers (also called cloud computing data centers) house IT infrastructure resources for shared use by multiple customers—from scores to millions of customers—via an Internet connection.
Managed data centers and colocation facilities are options for organizations that don’t have the space, staff, or expertise to deploy and manage some or all of their IT infrastructure on premise—but prefer not to host that infrastructure using the shared resources of a public cloud data center.
In a managed data center, the client company leases dedicated servers, storage and networking hardware from the data center provider, and the data center provider handles the administration, monitoring and management for the client company.
In a colocation facility, the client company owns all the infrastructure and leases a dedicated space to host it within the facility. In the traditional colocation model, the client company has sole access to the hardware and full responsibility for managing it; this is ideal for privacy and security but often impractical, particularly during outages or emergencies. Today, most colocation providers offer management and monitoring services for clients who want them.
Managed data centers and colocation facilities are often used to house remote data backup and disaster recovery technology for small and midsize businesses (SMBs).
Most modern data centers—even in-house on-premises data centers—have evolved from traditional IT architecture, where every application or workload run on its dedicated hardware, to cloud architecture, in which physical hardware resources—CPUs, storage, networking—are virtualized. Virtualization enables these resources to be abstracted from their physical limits, and pooled into capacity that can be allocated across multiple applications and workloads in whatever quantities they require.
Virtualization also enables software-defined infrastructure (SDI)—infrastructure that can be provisioned, configured, run, maintained and ‘spun down’ programmatically, without human intervention.
The combination of cloud architecture and SDI offers many advantages to data centers and their users, including the following:
Optimal utilization of compute, storage, and networking resources. Virtualization enables companies or clouds to serve the most users using the least hardware and with the least unused or idle capacity.
Rapid deployment of applications and services. SDI automation makes provisioning new infrastructure as easy as requesting via a self-service portal.
Scalability. Virtualized IT infrastructure is far easier to scale than traditional IT infrastructure. Even companies using on-premises data centers can add capacity on demand by bursting workloads to the cloud when necessary.
Variety of services and data center solutions. Companies and clouds can offer users a range of ways to consume and deliver IT, all from the same infrastructure. Choices are made based on workload demands, and include infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). These services can be offered in a private data center, or as cloud solutions in either a private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, or multi cloud environment.
Cloud-native development. Containerization and serverless computing, along with a robust open-source ecosystem, enable and accelerate DevOps cycles and application modernization as well as enable develop-once-deploy-anywhere apps.
Servers
Servers are powerful computers that deliver applications, services and data to end-user devices. Data center servers come in several form factors:
Rack-mount servers are wide, flat standalone servers—the size of a small pizza box— designed to be stacked on top of each other in a rack, to save space (vs. a tower or desktop server). Each rack-mount server has its own power supply, cooling fans, network switches, and ports, along with the usual processor, memory, and storage.
Blade servers are designed to save even more space. Each blade contains processors, network controllers, memory and sometimes storage; they’re made to fit into a chassis that holds multiple blades and contains the power supply, network management and other resources for all the blades in the chassis.
Mainframes are high-performance computers with multiple processors that can do the work of an entire room of rack-mount or blade servers. The first virtualizable computers, mainframes can process billions of calculations and transactions in real time.
The choice of form factor depends on many factors including available space in the data center, the workloads being run on the servers, the available power, and cost.
Most servers include some local storage capability—called direct-attached storage (DAS)—to enable the most frequently used data (hot data) to remain close to the CPU.
Two other data center storage configurations include network-attached storage (NAS), and a storage area network (SAN).
NAS provides data storage and data access to multiple servers over a standard Ethernet connection. The NAS device is usually a dedicated server with multiple storage media—hard disk drives (HDDs) and/or solid state drives (SSDs).
Like NAS, a SAN enables shared storage, but a SAN uses a separate network for the data and consists of a more complex mix of multiple storage servers, application servers, and storage management software.
A single data center may use all three storage configurations—DAS, NAS, and SAN—as well as file storage, block storage and object storage types.
The data center network, consisting of various types of switches, routers and fiber optics, carries network traffic across the servers (called east/west traffic), and to/from the servers to the clients (called north/south traffic).
As noted above, a data center’s network services are typically virtualized. This enables the creation of software-defined overlay networks, built on top of the network’s physical infrastructure, to accommodate specific security controls or service level agreements (SLAs).
Data centers need to be always-on, on at every level. Most servers feature dual power supplies. Battery-powered uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) protect against power surges and brief power outages. Powerful generators can kick in if a more severe power outage occurs.
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