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
