Data centers - Internet Brains

A Data Center is a large space owned / leased by big corporations to run their IT infrastructure businesses. One runs their own infrastructure in these DCs, or operates for a customer/s which is popularly known as infrastructure outsourcing.

Apart from running a datacenter, there is a complex set of supporting infrastructure, that need to be setup.

Location and Physical Security : Prime concern, this is the place where your data lives, after all. These facilities are specially designed to make abundant airflow available, well built to withstand natural calamities etc.,

Cooling: Major share of the DCs operating expenses are eaten by cooling devices, you need to have multiple layers of cooling coz those big servers were never made to sit and run calmy, their temperatures will reach 120 degrees C sometimes even more, when in full swing.

Electricity : Typical Data Center setup can have power drawn from multiple sources (at least 2 sources) with a generator backup and battery backup. These power lines are distinctly identified and distributed to each node.

Network: no network? Your DC is as good as a warehouse with a bunch of metal boxes. Networks are usually connected to your edge routers to leased lines with at least a Gbps of speed by ISPs. From at least 2 different locations. If you have a DR site, you would have to create a ICDN - Inter Data Center Network, if your primary DC suffers an outage, you can migrate all the load to DR DC and restore the services.

Servers, Switches, Firewall , Routers , Storage etc - Depends on what your requirement is, Numbers ranging hundred to thousands, there are multiple vendors providing plethora of solutions, so for a general, servers connect to switches which in turn through firewall, then router then again a firewall etc., We have SAN and NFS boxes which provide redundant storage (think in terms of network and power as said above) with potential to store in TBs of data generated by servers. Currently there are a lot of things happening in this space. Look for Hyper convergence.

Licensing & Support: The cost involved in buying the OS, software etc., and the efforts involved in getting support from the vendor when things screw up.

This is just a gist of what a typical DC is made up, and it is just a drop in an ocean, what is described above.

Data centers are physical locations where companies can store their important business data and applications. These are stored for distributing, collecting, storing, processing or to allow access to a large amount of data. They are also known as server farms because of the number of servers, stored in racks, required to process and store such vast quantities of data.

 The main components of a data structure are firewalls, application delivery controllers, storage systems, switches, routers, and so on. The network infrastructure connects both virtualized and physical servers, storage, data center services to end user locations. The computing resource provides storage, processing, memory and maintenance of structures that drive applications of the data center.

With advancements in technology, today data centers are increasingly migrating to the cloud, rather than storing data on physical servers. Maintaining and keeping so much data safe is a tough task. Fortunately, there are some excellent data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solutions that help data center not only manage their various security, energy, capacity, asset and environment management needs, providing real-time views through a single dashboard.

Thanks & Regards .