A data center is a facility that centralizes an organization’s IT operations and equipment, as well as where it stores, manages, and disseminates its data. Data centers house a network’s most critical systems and are vital to the continuity of daily operations. Consequentially, the security and reliability of data centers and their information is a top priority for organizations.
Data centers are simply centralized locations where computing and networking equipment is concentrated to collect, store, processing, distributing or allowing access to large amounts of data. They have existed in one form or another since the advent of computers.
Although data center designs are unique, they can generally be classified as internet-facing or enterprise (or “internal”) data centers. Internet-facing data centers usually support relatively few applications, are typically browser-based and have many users, typically unknown. In contrast, enterprise data centers service fewer users but host more applications that vary from off-the-shelf to custom applications.
Data center architectures and requirements can differ significantly. For example, a data center built for a cloud service provider like Amazon® EC2 satisfies facility, infrastructure, and security requirements that significantly differ from a completely private data center, such as one built for the Pentagon that is dedicated to securing classified data.
Why we need a data center?
Even though the hardware is constantly getting smaller, faster and more powerful, we are an increasingly data-hungry species, and the demand for processing power, storage space, and information, in general, is growing and constantly threatening to outstrip companies’ abilities to deliver.
Any entity that generates or uses data needs data centers on some level, including government agencies, educational bodies, telecommunications companies, financial institutions, retailers of all sizes, and the purveyors of online information and social networking services such as Google and Facebook. Lack of fast and reliable access to data can mean an inability to provide vital services or loss of customer satisfaction and revenue.
How does a data center work?
- The network infrastructure that connects servers (including virtual servers), data center services, storage, and external connectivity to end-user locations
- Storage infrastructure that provides storage arrays to store the ‘fuel’ of the data center-data
- Computing resources- the servers that provide processing, memory, local storage and network connectivity for the ‘engines’ of the data center- application.
- The data center is typically deployed to protect the performance and integrity of the core data components.
All of these usually resided in one place where physical racks and cabling are used to organize and interconnect them.
Why do we need a data center?
Of course to store data. Every day 2.5 Quintilian bytes of data are generated that comes from distinct sources and all this data needs to go somewhere. The data center houses this enormous amount of digital information that we would be able to access even after decades.
Take an example of Facebook: the photos, videos, links, and other multimedia files we upload are stored at the Facebook Data Center situated in different regions of the globe. Thus, we can retrieve our files located within our account any time we want to.
Aside from this fact, there are millions of companies running a business online that produce countless data and they use data center services to secure their digital belongings for a smooth workflow. In addition to storage space, the data center also delivers Internet networks, digital data safety features, and other hosting and data management solutions.
So we conclude that the data center is necessary for the security and privacy purpose of people’s daily based data.