Types of data centers


What exactly is a data center?

A data center is a facility where businesses house their essential applications and data. The design of a data center is based on a network of computing infrastructure and storage resources that deliver shared applications and data. The Routers, switches, firewalls, storage systems, servers, and application-delivery controllers are components of a data center architecture.

What defines a modern data center?

Modern data centers are quite different from just a few years ago. Virtual networks that support apps and workloads across pools of physical infrastructure are now commonplace, as is a multi-cloud architecture. As a result, the growth of virtualization has added another vital dimension to data center infrastructure management.

In today’s world, data is indisputably contemporary, and it resides in multiple data centers, the edge, and even public and private clouds. The data center must communicate simultaneously across both on-premises and cloud locations—even the public cloud data center collection. Currently, cloud computing allows businesses to give their customers access to applications anywhere. They utilize cloud provider data center resources.

Why is a data center needed?

Almost all business activities, including data storage and computing, are handled by data centers. The data center is the business of a modern firm to the extent that it is run on computers.

In the world of business IT, data centers are built to support company applications and activities such as:

  • Use email and sharing to communicate
  • The computer software that increases productivity
  • Customer relationship management (CRM)
  • Enterprise resource planning (ERP) and databases
  • Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data are all terms that refer to the use of computers.
  • Virtual desktop infrastructure, collaboration, and communication services

Types of Data Center Facilities

There are many types of data centers and service models to choose from in these facilities with various different data centre infrastructure. The method by which data centers are classified differs based on whether organizations control them, how they match (if they fit) into the topology of other data centers, what computing and storage technologies they employ, and even their energy efficiency. The following are the four most frequent types of data centers:

Enterprise data centers

These are developed, owned, and operated by businesses, and they’re designed to appeal to their consumers. They are generally located on the corporate campus.

Managed services data centers

The data centers themselves are owned and maintained by a third party (or managed data center services provider) on behalf of a business. The firm purchases the equipment and infrastructure rather than renting them.

Colocation data centers

In colocation data centers, a firm leases space in a data center energy efficiency owned by others and located off the company’s premises. The data center physical infrastructure, such as the facility, cooling systems, bandwidth, security, and other features, is housed by a colocation provider. The company provides and manages the components, such as servers, storage, and firewalls.

Cloud data centers

A cloud managed services providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), IBM Cloud, or another public cloud computing provider hosts data and applications in this off-premises data center facility model.

Types of Data Center Components

Compute, storage, and network components are the three main core components of data centers. However, these components are merely the tip of the iceberg in a modern DC. Beneath the surface, a data center’s service level agreements can only be met with adequate support infrastructure.

Network infrastructure

Datacenters require physical components between servers, switches, routers, and firewalls to connect them to the outside world. They can handle a lot of traffic without slowing down when set up correctly and structurally. The core layer is connected to the access layer through core switches at the edge, while the data center’s Internet connection is accessed through a middle aggregate layer. Advances such as cloud-level agility and scalability are now available in on-premises networks through advancements like hyperscale network data center security and software-defined networking.

Storage infrastructure

Sensitive data is housed in data center equipment used for both organizational and customer needs. Increasing the amount of storage accessible by backing up data in multiple formats increases storage capacity. In addition, non-volatile storage technologies have improved data access speeds. Software-defined storage systems also enhance employee efficiency in managing a storage system, just as software-defined networking does.

Computing resources

The data center’s engines are its servers. Servers may use a variety of mechanisms to process and memory, depending on the platform: physical processing and memory, virtualized processing and memory, distributed across containers, or distributed among remote nodes in an edge-computing architecture. Because large data centers must execute tasks that are most appropriate for them, specialized processors such as those specializing in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) may not be the best option.

What Is Data Center Infrastructure?

The most popular standard in data center infrastructure and design is ANSI/TIA-942. It covers ANSI/TIA-942-certification requirements; The Data Center Combination certifies that the facility meets all of the needs for one of four categories of data center tiers evaluated for redundancy and fault tolerance levels.

Tier 1: Basic site infrastructure.

These are the most basic data center designs and include a UPS. Tier I data centers do not have redundant systems, but they should ensure at least 99.671 percent availability.

Tier 2: Redundant-capacity component site infrastructure

These data centers are designed for maximum uptime and include system, power, and cooling redundancy of 99.741%.

Tier 3: Concurrently maintainable site infrastructure

Concurrently maintainable ensures that no component can be taken offline without disrupting operations. The data centers in this section are only partially fault-tolerant. Complete redundancy with a 99.98 percent uptime guarantee ensures that your system will run uninterruptedly even in the event of an outage.

Tier 4: Fault-tolerant site infrastructure

It’s fault-tolerant, so any production capacity can be insulated from any outage. As a result, the data centers have 99.995 percent availability, or no more than 26.3 minutes of downtime per year, total fault tolerance, system redundancy, and 96-hour disaster recovery.

What is the future of the data centers?

The Data Center’s future is bright: converged infrastructure and hyper-convergence are increasingly common in modern Data Centers. The advent of artificial intelligence has offered a slew of benefits for Data Center operations, as well as previously insoluble issues. For example, many firms are concerned about the risk of data loss and the difficulty of rebuilding their infrastructure, which is why they have been moving to virtual desktops. Another problem that made within a Data Center operations expensive and difficult was siloed management approaches. The technique of managing a Data Center is organised with converged infrastructures; your firm becomes more proactive in optimizing operational procedures and keeping data on the cloud safe thanks to a single interface for infrastructure management.

Most servers are still split, and that’s where hyper-convergence shines its light. Hyper-convergent data centers are software-defined Data Centers that use the term intelligent Data Center. Virtualisation and convergence consolidate all active layers into a single machine, including computing, networking, and storage. Everything is now on the same server, offering enhanced efficiency, lower expenses, and greater control over the Data Center components with hyper-convergence.