How Data Centers Work

What is a Data Center?

Data centers are simply centralized locations where IT and network equipment are concentrated for the purpose of collecting, storing, processing, distributing or providing access to large amounts of data. They have existed in one way or another since the advent of computers.

Back in the days of the room-sized giants that were our first computers, a data center could have a single supercomputer. As the equipment got smaller and cheaper and the need to process data started to increase - and grew exponentially - we started networking multiple servers (the industrial counterparts of our computers) together to increase power processing. We connect them to communication networks so that people can access them, or their information, remotely. Many of these cluster servers and associated equipment can be hosted in one 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.

Because of their high concentration of servers, often stacked in racks arranged in rows, data centers services are sometimes referred to as server farms. They provide important services such as data storage, backup, and recovery, data management and networking. These centers can store and serve websites, run email and instant messaging (IM) services, provide cloud storage and applications, enable e-commerce transactions, feed online gaming communities and do a host of other things that require a wholesale analysis of zeros and ones.

Almost all businesses and government entities need their own data center or have to log on to someone else. Some build and maintain them internally, others rent servers in co-location facilities (also known as colos) and some use cloud-based public services from hosts such as Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, and Google.

Colos and other huge data centers began appearing in the late 1990s and early 2000s, shortly after the spread of Internet use. The data centers of some large companies are distributed all over the planet to satisfy the constant need to access huge quantities of information. Today there are over 3 million data centers of different shapes and sizes in the world