What is a data center called?
A data center is a facility of one or more buildings that house a centralized computing infrastructure, typically servers, storage, and networking equipment. Show
In this world of apps, big data, and digital everything, you can’t stay on top of your industry without cutting-edge computing infrastructure. If you want to keep things in-house, the answer is the data center. Its primary role is to support all the crucial business applications and workloads that all organizations use to run their business. In this article, we’ll break down exactly what’s in a data center, different types and tier ratings, crucial systems to maximize uptime, and how to find the right location if you’re planning to build one of your own. The Role of a Data Center: What Does a Data Center Do?A data center is designed to handle high volumes of data and traffic with minimum latency, which makes it particularly useful for the following use cases:
There are other examples as well, but the above are some of the most common use cases for businesses. Of course, in 2021, you could just outsource all of the data processing to a third party, like AWS or Google Cloud. But it’s not always easy for an enterprise to give another party access to the data, not to mention it’s often more expensive at scale. According to a 2020 study, companies choose to use a data center over public environments to reduce costs, solve performance issues, or meet uphold regulatory requirements. A data center houses everything required to safely store and process data for your organization (or your clients), including physical servers, hard drives, and cutting-edge networking equipment. The infrastructure also includes external and backup power systems, external networking and communication systems, cabling systems, environmental controls, and security systems. If you’ve ever visited a data center, it can often look and feel like you’re in a sci-fi movie. With the rows of servers, cooling towers, and the absurd amount of network cables, you could swear you were looking at The Matrix mainframe. Today, when uptime as close to 100% as possible is expected, a data center often includes a smart control system. It optimizes cooling, climate control, and more automatically to optimize performance. This is a Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) system. It basically takes the same concepts as a smart house (automatic temperature control, etc.) to the next level. If you never want your private cloud of applications and big data to be unavailable, it’s a necessity. Types of Data CentersThere are many types of data centers that may or may not be suitable for your company’s needs. Let’s take a closer look: Colocation For example, instead of renting a virtual machine from a public cloud provider, you can just straight-up rent a certain amount of their hardware from specified data centers. Enterprise Cloud Edge Data Center When IoT devices and low-latency data demands are high, organizations are deploying Edge computing facilities. Micro Data Center Large enterprise data centers are still the most popular, but experts foresee continued growth in colocation and micro data centers. Data centers are still viable assets for organizations, but as computing demands and the industry evolve, the enterprise data center is morphing into a hybrid computing infrastructure. This modern approach encompasses the traditional data center, which typically houses mission-critical applications where maximum uptime and privacy is a must, sometimes called “the crown jewels”. To meet the demands of tier 2 applications (non-mission-critical apps), organizations often leverage public cloud data centers. For example, many companies rely on third-party cloud services for their DevOps activities. We also categorize data centers by tiers, based on their expected uptime and the robustness of their infrastructure. Data Center Tier Rating Breakdown: Tier 1, 2, 3, 4Companies also rate data centers by tier to highlight their expected uptime and reliability. Let’s break it down:
Which tier of data center you need depends on your service SLAs and other factors. In addition to hardware, where you decide to build your data center can have a big impact on your results. Choosing Your Data Center Location Is CrucialChoosing the location of your data center is one of the most important decisions you’ll make. Here are just some of the things you must consider:
Data Center Physical Security: How to Keep Your Data SafeThere are three important concepts to keep in mind when designing a policy to keep your data safe and available at all times — data security, service continuation, and personnel and asset safety. Data Security Service Continuation Personnel and asset safety and preservation Asset Integrity Monitoring: Improve Your Data Center SecurityAsset integrity monitoring is a cornerstone practice for any major computing infrastructure. It continuously monitors your system for anomalies, and alerts you immediately for power and environmental incidents. Data center teams can use them to:
Operations and security teams benefit from increased visibility and a simplified audit process with an accurate asset data set.
What is a Hybrid Computing Infrastructure?A hybrid computing infrastructure means using a mix of traditional enterprise data centers and public cloud infrastructure. A hybrid computing infrastructure augments the traditional data center. It allows for optimizing application workload balancing, optimizing user experience and costs. It also enables the adoption of new technologies from virtualization, high-density racks, and hyper-converged infrastructure equipment. (If you have no idea what any of that means, all the more reason to outsource some of your computing.) A hybrid approach allows for any organization and management style to tailor their infrastructure that is right for their business. Conservative and security-focused organizations will keep critical applications under their watch in a physical data center owned and managed by their personnel. For organizations that aren’t ready to invest the tens of millions to build or expand data centers, using a colocation provider is a great option for balancing risk and cost. Where speed of deployment and short-term computing power is needed, the public cloud and SaaS deployments are ideal. In use cases where latency must be as low as possible — for example, IoT or high-speed transactions — Edge computing is crucial. How does Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) Software Improve the Data Center?DCIM bridges the gap between facilities and IT, coordinating planning and managing through automation and transparent communication, leveraging a “single source of truth”. What does that actually mean? All the data and controls you need to manage your data center are available in one place. (And most of the time, it controls itself perfectly without any of your input.) Asset Management Workflow Automation Bi-lateral Systems Communication Infrastructure and Workload Optimization Space and Efficiency Planning Risk,
Audit, Compliance, and Reporting ConclusionEven as the world of cloud computing continues to grow with stricter regulations and higher customer expectations, we’re seeing a return to the data center, often in a network of smaller “Edge” or “micro” data centers. If you’re looking to start your own data center, and you want to maximize uptime and efficiency, Nlyte can act as the brain of your data center, managing your cooling towers, climate systems, and more to optimize performance and equipment longevity. Book a demo today to see what the brains of the data center of the future looks like. What are the four main types of data centers?Data center needs vary depending on their structure, physical limitations, density requirements and more. Here are four common data center types including onsite, colocation facilities, hyperscale, and edge data centers, as well as their use cases and industry trends.
Is a data center the same as a server?Both deployment options provide you with control over your data and infrastructure. The main distinction is that while Server runs on a single node with internalized data stores, Data Center allows you to run on multiple nodes with externalized data stores.
Is database a data center?They hold data in them which actually are hosted on the servers that reside in data centres. So, ultimately, a data warehouse is a relational database with a different database/schema design. You can say data warehouses are deployed on servers which reside inside data centres, physically.
What are data centre facilities?A data centre is a physical location - most commonly a building - that houses core IT and computing services and infrastructure. Put even more simply, a data centre is a physical place to store and compute data.
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