What Is A Data Center? (2024)

Data centers are defined as physical places that house and run networking components and infrastructure, including servers, firewalls, switches, routers and storage systems, and all the electrical utilities associated with these parts. These resources enable an organization to power computing needs and business applications.

The data center is the central hub from which an organization’s information technology (IT) operations and data processing generate and it has evolved as technology has gone cloud-ward. Historically, data centers were privately owned environments on a company’s physical premises. Today, many organizations leverage virtualized infrastructure that is pooled across multiple environments. However, even if your business runs everything in the cloud, your computing power ultimately derives from a data center somewhere physical.

Data centers are important for several reasons, which are listed below.

Supports Business Applications

Few businesses today operate without any applications. A business application is anything from customer relationship management (CRM) to enterprise resource planning (ERP) to human resources (HR) platforms. If your business is too small to need these applications, it’s likely you use communication apps like Slack or project management apps like Asana. Even if all you use is email, that’s still an application that requires computing resources to power it—and those resources are all housed in data centers.

Supports Data Storage and Management

Organizations have had to process more and more data as the number of computing devices exploded in business environments over the last 20 years. Every corporate endpoint like a cellphone or laptop delivers data to a business and that data needs to live somewhere. Data centers—whether businesses run their own on-premise, lease equipment elsewhere or use a cloud provider—keep corporate data retrievable and manageable.

Keeps Data Safe

Data centers, if protected properly, contain many layers of security to keep data safe. From biometric scanners to alarms to human security staff, data centers leverage all manner of tools to protect the hardware that stores an organization’s data. Aside from physical protection, data centers also connect to external networks to access security solutions such as firewalls, failover, load balancing and intrusion protection.

Serves as the Foundation of Modern Business

You’re hard-pressed to find an organization or government today that doesn’t rely on a data center in some capacity. The nature of the digital world means businesses must run modern, secure IT environments that completely depend on data centers. Even organizations that are entirely cloud-based pay cloud providers to secure and supply their computing power and those cloud providers deliver that power through their data centers.

Offers Flexibility and Scalability

If organizations choose a data center model run by a third party off-premise, they can adjust their storage and infrastructure needs more easily than if they had on-premises data centers. By opting for colocation or managed data center services (more on those below), businesses skip the steep up-front costs of setting up their own data centers and they leverage the flexibility of paying for the storage and data capacity they need in the moment. These models allow organizations to expand and shrink capacity as needed—resulting in cost savings.

Data centers are made up of the following components:

• Servers: Servers are computing machines that process, store and manage data. They have high processing power and much more memory than a typical computer. While there are varying types of servers, two common types are rack servers (stackable in racks) and blade servers (more modular and stackable in thin layers in a chassis).
• Types of storage: Organizations will choose different types of storage in the data center depending on the size of their data and the speed of access they require. A storage area network (SAN) connects servers to storage and is useful for storing structured data. A network-attached storage (NAS) system is useful for remote file serving and runs like its own server, making it better for storing unstructured data.
• Routers: A router is a gateway between computer networks that passes data packets along the right routes.
• Switches: A switch is hardware that connects multiple devices in a network together and sends data packets among those devices.
• Data center facility: The facility itself that houses all the networking equipment also contains batteries for backup, generators, cooling systems like fans, thousands of cables and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS).
• Software-defined networking: Software-defined networking (SDN) technology emerged around 2011 and is applied to traditional networks in data centers to control the hardware via software. It allows IT administrators to make changes to the network from a software-based interface without having to go into the data center physically to configure or provision resources.

Organizations today have their choice from a variety of data center services.

On-premises

The most traditional of data centers, this type is defined as a privately owned data center on an organization’s physical site. It is likely made up of one or more rooms that contain all the aforementioned equipment and it requires one or more IT people to run it. Organizations that opt for on-premises data centers must buy and manage their hardware and software—a model that is falling out of favor increasingly with business leaders today as the cost-effectiveness of the cloud model grows in popularity.

Colocation

A “colo” data center offers a model where organizations lease physical infrastructure from a third party. The colocation provider houses the data center infrastructure themselves and businesses pay to use and access it. With colocation, you pay for connectivity and power—and you have to maintain the hardware yourself—but you don’t have to worry about physical security. Some colocation providers will offer hosted options in which organizations pay them to manage their infrastructure for them.

Managed Data Center Service

This model is also known as “managed data center support service,” “data center managed services” or “data center as a service”. As with colocation, a third party houses the data center infrastructure. This provider is often a managed services provider (MSP) that may act as an outsourced IT expert for an organization. MSPs will vary their managed data center offerings, but they commonly provide hardware maintenance, storage, backup and disaster recovery. Some MSPs will take on the full range of duties of an IT person managing an on-premises data center for their customers.

Cloud

Organizations pay cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure, to access virtual infrastructure and purchase computing power through the cloud on an as-needed basis. The cloud providers own the data center infrastructure and maintain and manage all of it. In comparison to colocation, the cloud model doesn’t allow users to lease any infrastructure. In the past, using cloud providers for networking needs seemed risky as users have no physical access to the data center equipment nor control over the security, but major cloud providers have made massive investments in security over the years to offer highly secure infrastructure.

Edge

Edge data centers are smaller facilities that house computing and storage resources geographically closer to where those resources are used. These facilities are often used to deploy applications quickly as their proximity to users means lower latency and higher bandwidth.

Whether it’s on-premises, owned by cloud providers, leased or fully managed, the data center is the powerhouse of modern business. It hosts and safeguards the essential hardware and software that drive every digital transaction, customer interaction and task. It is the physical hub for the technology that shapes our world in the cloud.

As electrical and computer engineering have evolved to condense more processing power and storage into smaller, more efficient machines, data centers have enjoyed modernization. Today, organizations have a range of choices when it comes to data center infrastructure—with virtual machines and software-defined solutions improving the utilization of hardware. While emerging technologies make it difficult to predict the future of the data center, one thing is likely to remain true: every digital instance is founded in a synapse in a data center.