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Data centers are an important aspect of our digital economy.
They store and manage data and drive your applications and systems, ensuring a consistent user experience.
At present, billions of data are being generated every year.
Since every business has different needs, different types ofdata centersare available to cater to those needs.
What Is A Data Center?
They depend mainly on data centers to run IT operations at optimal speed, stability, and security.
Data centers were developed around the 1940s like ENIAC one of the earliest complex computers to maintain and operate.
They were expensive and leveraged often for military purposes.
They started maintaining special computer rooms that were termed as data centers.
Its usage accelerated in the 2000s when organizations needed a superfast internet connection and IT operation.
They started building large facilities to enable enhanced capabilities.
How Does It Work?
In addition, organizations deploy data center services to ensure the components work at optimal performance with integrity.
A managed data center can either be partially or fully managed.
Suitable for: The ideal users of managed data centers are medium to large businesses.
Benefits: You dont have to deal with regular maintenance, security, and other aspects.
It can be situated at a site off-premises or on-premises based on their convenience.
Its because they have enough revenue to support their data centers at multiple locations.
It also helps the companies understand their needs more and scale their capacities accordingly.
However, building enterprise data center facilities needs heavy investments, maintenance needs, time, and effort.
It helps connect data pipe devices to different data pipe and telecommunication service providers.
Suitable for: Colocation data centers are suitable for medium to large businesses.
Its like avirtual datacenter with even more benefits than colocation data centers.
The popular cloud service providers are Amazon AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, etc.
They also back up your data, so you dont lose it even if something goes wrong.
Now, cloud data centers can be of two types public and private.
Suitable for: Cloud data centers are ideal for almost any organization of any throw in or scale.
They are smaller data center facilities situated closer to the customers an organization serves.
They are connected to a central, large data center or other data centers.
They are designed to be highly scalable by adding more devices and equipment or increasing system power.
The demand for hyper scale data centers is increasing with increasing data generation.
Businesses now deal with an enormous amount of data, which begins to rise.
Benefits: Initially, the data center providers designed hyper scale data centers for large public cloud service providers.
Lets have a quick look at them.
Carrier hotelsare the main internet exchange points for the entire data traffic belonging to a specific area.
Carrier hotels focus on more fiber and telecom providers compared to a common colo.
They are usually located downtown with a mature fiber infrastructure.
Microdata center:Its a condensed version of the edge data center.
It can be smaller, like an office room, to handle the data processing in a specific location.
Traditional data centers:They consisted of multiple servers in racks, performing different tasks.
Over time, they add more servers to facilitate more capabilities.
It needs monitoring the operating systems using monitoring tools, which requires a certain level of expertise.
In addition, it requires patching and updating, and verifying them for security.
All these require heavy investments, not to mention the powering and cooling cost is added extra.
It contains modules and components offering scalability in addition to power and cooling capabilities.
Modular data centers can be of two types:
What Are the Data Center Tiers?
Another way of classifying data centers based on uptime and reliability is by data center tiers.
The Uptime Institute developed it during the 1990s, and there are 4 data center tiers.
Tier 1:A tier 1 data center has basic capacity and includes a UPS.
It has fewer components for redundancy and backup and a single path for cooling and power.
It also involves higher downtime and may lack energy efficiency systems.
It offers a minimum of 99.671% uptime, which means 28.8 hours of downtimes yearly.
It also has a singular path for cooling and power.
They are generally private data centers, and they also lack energy efficiency.
Tier 2 data centers can offer a minimum of 99.741% uptime, which means 22 hours downtimes yearly.
It has different paths for cooling and power to help maintain and update the systems.
Tier 3 data centers have redundant systems to limit operational errors and equipment failure.
They utilize UPS systems that supply power continuously to servers and backup generators.
Why Do You Need Data Centers?
The demand for information, high processing capacity, and more storage is growing.
A data center can serve this purpose and also cater to efficient management.
In addition, data centers offer innovative ways to store and manage data to enable cloud computing implementation.
Furthermore, data centers have robust backup systems in place.
Your data can be duplicated and distributed across different locations.
It can also create a backup of your backups to ensure you never lose the data.
Data Security
Data security is crucial for every business with the increasing amount of cybercrimes.
Cost Efficiency
Power outages or other disturbances can cost billions of dollars.
By enabling a data center with systems to withstand such conditions, you might save costs.
By taking up services from a data center provider, you could further cut down costs.
This way, you dont have to build a data center from scratch or maintain and update the components.
