What is a Datacenter?

Overview

A datacenter a special facility designed to house, manage, and support computing resources that are crucial for an organization’s existence. As control unit is the nervous system of the computer, datacenter is the brain of a given company. Therefore, it demands layered security design to protect valuable organizational data. Moreover, it provides shared access to applications and data through network, compute, and storage infrastructures.

The datacenter encompasses purposeful building structures, power and cooling systems, special-purpose rooms, equipment cabinets (racks), and structural cabling. Furthermore, it contains network devices, virtual and physical servers, storage systems, application software stack, physical and logical security systems, monitoring centers, and more.

Types of Datacenters

Datacenters contain computing, storage, networking, security and other infrastructure components. Organizations may choose from one or more of the following types of datacenters to receive these services:

Enterprise Datacenters: Organizations construct their own datacenters to host services and applications. This is specifically a type of datacenter a single organization builds and hosts its resources for its internal purposes. 

Colocation Datacenters: Organizations sometimes can address their networking, computing, and storage requirements using existing datacenters owned by other companies. In this arrangement, resources can be available in terms of rents, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and other contractual agreements.

Managed Services Datacenters: Organizations may wish to focus on their core businesses and buy datacenter services from third parties. This is another alternative for companies that decide to directly buy services from providers.

Cloud Datacenters: These are distributed and on premise or off-premise datacenters accessible through the internet. Organizations can build their own private cloud enabled datacenters or buy cloud services from providers. This will depend on the requirements of a given organization.

Datacenter Tiers

According to uptime institute, datacenters may be built with one or more of the following tier standards:

Tier I: These data centers do not provide redundancy but should guarantee at least 99.671% availability. Tier I standards fulfill only the basic components of datacenters.

T. II: These data centers include redundant systems, power and cooling facilities and guarantee at least 99.741% availability.

T. III: These data centers provide partial fault tolerance and are fully redundant. It guarantees a 99.982% availability. It is concurrently maintainable and ensures that any component can be taken out of service without affecting production.

Tier IV: These data centers guarantee 99.995% availability. It also supports full fault tolerance and system redundancy.