Data Center Basics

Before we dig deep into what the different architectures of a data center are, let’s first discuss what a data center is, what its core components are, and what the different types of data centers are.

At its simplest, a data center is a physical facility that organizations use to house their critical applications and data. A data center’s design is based on a network of computing and storage resources that enable the delivery of shared applications and data. The key components of a data center design include routers, switches, firewalls, storage systems, servers, and application-delivery controllers.

Modern data centers are very different from what they were just a short time ago. Infrastructure has shifted from traditional on-premises physical servers to virtual networks that support applications and workloads across pools of physical infrastructure and into a multicloud environment. In this era, data exists and is connected across multiple data centers, the edge, and public and private clouds. The data center must be able to communicate across these multiple sites—both on-premises 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.

In the world of enterprise IT, data centers are designed to support the following business applications and activities:

• Email and file sharing
• Productivity applications
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Enterprise resource planning (ERP) and databases
• Big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning
• Virtual desktops, communications, and collaboration services

A data center consists of the following core infrastructure components:

• Network infrastructure: This connects servers (physical and virtualized), data center services, storage, and external connectivity to end-user locations.
• Storage infrastructure: Data is the fuel of the modern data center. Storage systems are used to hold this valuable commodity.
• Computing infrastructure: Applications are the engines of a data center. Computing infrastructure consists of servers, which provide the processing, memory, local storage, and network connectivity that drive applications. Computing infrastructure has experienced three macro waves of evolution over the last 65 years:
  • The first wave saw the shift from proprietary mainframes to x86-based servers, based on-premises and managed by internal IT teams.
  • A second wave saw widespread virtualization of the infrastructure that supported applications. This allowed for improved use of resources and mobility of workloads across pools of physical infrastructure.
  • The third wave finds us in the present, where we are seeing the move to cloud, hybrid cloud, and cloud-native (that is, applications born in the cloud).

This evolution has given rise to distributed computing. This is where data and applications are distributed among disparate systems, connected and integrated by network services and interoperability standards to function as a single environment. It has meant the term data center is now used to refer to the department that has responsibility for these systems irrespective of where they are located.

Since data center components store and manage business-critical data and applications, data center security is critical in the data center design. The following data center services are typically deployed to protect the performance and integrity of the core data center components:

• Network security appliances: These include firewall and intrusion protection to safeguard the data center.
• Application delivery assurance: To maintain application performance, these mechanisms provide application resiliency and availability via automatic failover and load balancing.

Data center components require significant infrastructure to support the center’s hardware and software. This includes power subsystems, uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs), ventilation, cooling systems, fire suppression, backup generators, and connections to external networks.