What is a data center

What makes a modern data center different?

Today's data centers are fundamentally different from those in use more recently. Instead of standard on-premises physical servers, the infrastructure uses virtual networks that distribute applications and workloads across physical infrastructure and a multi-cloud environment.

Today, data exists and interacts across multiple data centers, at the network perimeter, in private and public clouds. The data center must support the exchange of data across all of these sites, both on-site and in the cloud. Even the public cloud is a collection of data centers. When applications are hosted in the cloud, they use data center resources from the cloud provider.

Why are data centers important to business?

In an enterprise IT infrastructure, data centers support business applications and processes, including the following: ccna data center

Email and file sharing

Productivity apps

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) and databases

Big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning

Virtual desktop, communication and collaboration services

Main components of a data center

The data center structure uses routers, switches, firewalls, storage systems, servers, and application granting controllers. Because these components store and control business-critical data and applications, the security of the data center is critical to its design. This ensures:

Network infrastructure. It provides connectivity to servers (physical and virtual), data centers, storage, and external connectivity for end-user objects.

Storage infrastructure. At the heart of a modern data center is data. Storage systems are used to house this valuable resource.

Computing resources. Applications are data center engines. These servers provide processing, memory, local storage, network connectivity, which is what applications need to run.

How do data centers work?

Typically, data center deployments are performed to ensure the efficient operation and integrity of the main components of the data center.

Network protection devices. This category includes firewall and intrusion protection, which are responsible for securing the data center.

Providing access to applications. To maintain application performance, these mechanisms provide fault tolerance and availability of applications through automatic failover and load balancing.

What is a data center object?

Data center components require a large infrastructure to support the center's hardware and software. This infrastructure includes power subsystems, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), ventilation, cooling and fire extinguishing systems, standby generators, and external grid connections.

Data Center Infrastructure Standards

The most widely used standard for designing data centers and their infrastructure is ANSI / TIA-942. It includes standards for certification ANSI / TIA-942, which ensures compliance with one of four data center tier categories that differ in terms of redundancy and resiliency.

Level 1: basic infrastructure of the facility.  A Tier 1 data center provides limited physical protection. It uses single-capacity components and a single distribution path without redundancy. 

Level 2: Facility infrastructure with spare capacity component.  This level of data center provides enhanced protection against physical attacks. It uses spare capacity components and a single, non-redundant distribution path. 

Level 3: parallel serviced facility infrastructure. This datacenter protects against virtually all physical impacts, provides components with redundant capacity and multiple independent distribution paths. Each component can be removed or replaced without disabling the end-user service. 

Level 4: Resilient Facility Infrastructure. Such a data center is distinguished by the highest rates of fault tolerance and redundancy. With redundant capacity components and multiple independent distribution paths, concurrent maintenance and troubleshooting can be performed anywhere in the infrastructure with no downtime.