What is a data center? How cloud Data Centers Work

A data center is a building, dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems.
Since IT operations are crucial for business continuity, it generally includes redundant or backup components and infrastructure for power supply, data communication connections, environmental controls, and various security devices. A large data center is an industrial-scale operation using as much electricity as a small town.

Data centers have their roots in the huge computer rooms of the 1940s, typified by ENIAC, one of the earliest examples of a data center. Early computer systems, complex to operate and maintain, required a special environment in which to operate. Many cables were necessary to connect all the components, and methods to accommodate and organize these were devised such as standard racks to mount equipment, raised floors, and cable trays (installed overhead or under the elevated floor). A single mainframe required a great deal of power and had to be cooled to avoid overheating. Security became important computers were expensive and were often used for military purposes. Basic design guidelines for controlling access to the computer room were therefore devised.

During the boom of the microcomputer industry, and especially during the 1980s, users started to deploy computers everywhere, in many cases with little or no care about operating requirements. However, as information technology (IT) operations started to grow in complexity, organizations grew aware of the need to control IT resources. The advent of Unix from the early 1970s led to the subsequent proliferation of freely available Linux-compatible PC operating-systems during the 1990s. These were called "servers", as timesharing operating systems such as Unix rely heavily on the client-server model to facilitate sharing unique resources between multiple users. The availability of inexpensive networking equipment, coupled with new standards for the network structured cabling, made it possible to use a hierarchical design that put the servers in a specific room inside the company. The use of the term "data-center", as applied to specially designed computer rooms, started to gain popular recognition about this time.

The boom of data centers came during the dot-com bubble of 1997–2000. Companies needed fast Internet connectivity and non-stop operation to deploy systems and to establish a presence on the Internet. Installing such equipment was not viable for many smaller companies. Many companies started building very large facilities, called Internet data centers (IDCs),[10] which provide enhanced capabilities, such as crossover backup: "If a Bell Atlantic line is cut, we can transfer them to minimize the time of the outage.

The term cloud data centers (CDCs) has been used. Data centers typically cost a lot to build and to maintain. increasingly, the division of these terms has almost disappeared and they are being integrated into the term "data center".

Datacenter transformation takes a step-by-step approach through integrated projects carried out over time. This differs from a traditional method of data center upgrades that takes a serial and siloed approach. The typical projects within a data center transformation initiative include standardization/consolidation, virtualization, automation, and security.

The "lights-out" data center, also known as a darkened or a dark data center, is a data center that, ideally, has all but eliminated the need for direct access by personnel, except under extraordinary circumstances. Because of the lack of need for staff to enter the data center, it can be operated without lighting. All of the devices are accessed and managed by remote systems, with automation programs used to perform unattended operations. In addition to the energy savings, reduction in staffing costs, and the ability to locate the site further from population centers, implementing a lights-out data center reduces the threat of malicious attacks upon the infrastructure.

Communications in data centers today are most often based on networks running the IP protocol suite. Data centers contain a set of routers and switches that transport traffic between the servers and to the outside world which is connected according to the data center network architecture. The redundancy of the Internet connection is often provided by using two or more upstream service providers (see Multihoming).

Some of the servers at the data center are used for running the basic Internet and intranet services needed by internal users in the organization, e.g., e-mail servers, proxy servers, and DNS servers. Network security elements are also usually deployed: firewalls, VPN gateways, intrusion detection systems, and so on. Also common are monitoring systems for the network and some of the applications. Additional off-site monitoring systems are also typical, in case of a failure of communications inside the data center.

Data centers use a lot of power, consumed by two main usages: the power required to run the actual equipment and then the power required to cool the equipment. Power-efficiency reduces the first category. Cooling cost reduction from natural ways includes location decisions: When the focus is not being near good fiber connectivity, power grid connections, and people-concentrations to manage the equipment, a data center can be miles away from the users. 'Mass' data centers like Google or Facebook don't need to be near population centers. Arctic locations can use outside air, which provides cooling, is getting more popular. Renewable electricity sources are another plus. Bitcoin mining is increasingly being seen as a potential way to build data centers at the site of renewable energy production. Curtailed and clipped energy can be used to secure transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain providing another revenue stream to renewable energy producers.

A cloud Data Center is significantly different from a traditional Data Center; there is nothing similar between these two computing systems other than the fact that they both store data. A cloud Data Center is not physically located in a particular organization’s office it’s all online! When your data is stored on cloud servers, it automatically gets fragmented and duplicated across various locations for secure storage. In the case of a cloud data center, the actual hardware is managed and run by the cloud company in question, often with the help of a third-party managed services provider. Clients then run their applications and manage their data within a virtual infrastructure that runs on the cloud servers. there are any failures, your cloud services provider will make sure that there is a backup of your backup as well.