Learn about how data centers are organized, how they operate, and the different types.
Definition Definition Components OperationsA data center is a centralized physical facility that stores businesses’ critical applications and data. A common data center definition is a location where computing and networking equipment is used to collect, process, and store data, as well as to distribute and enable access to resources.
The electronic exchange of data is now required for nearly every business and personal interaction. Even traditional tasks such as making a phone call, reading a book, or watching TV are now largely digital. This ever-growing demand for new digital information requires vast amounts of computing and networking equipment, which are stored in data centers.
Data centers have existed since the early days of computers but have evolved dramatically as technology becomes cheaper, smaller, and more advanced. The early data centers were typically comprised of one huge supercomputer, but modern versions are now home to thousands of servers connecting to various communication networks.
This shift is largely being driven by an exponential growth in data volumes. For example, IDC’s Data Age paper predicted a tenfold increase in data levels between 2018 and 2025. It predicts 175 zettabytes of data will be in existence by 2025 which, if you attempted to download at the current average internet speed, would take 1.8 billion years to download.
This mass of data now connects across multiple data centers, at the edge, and on public and private clouds. But it still has to be stored somewhere. So the modern data center remains as crucial as ever. However, it has to evolve to communicate across main on-premises facilities, various cloud locations, and cloud providers. As a result, the modern data center infrastructure has developed from on-premises physical servers to virtual infrastructures that support applications and workloads in multi-cloud environments.
Given the importance of the vast amounts of customer data businesses now have, as well as the applications and server resources they power, data centers now have dedicated data center firewalls to protect them.
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