Standards for Data Center Infrastructure

The most widely adopted standard for data center design and data center infrastructure is ANSI/TIA-942. It includes standards for ANSI/TIA-942-ready certification, which ensures compliance with one of four categories of data center tiers rated for levels of redundancy and fault tolerance:

• Tier 1: Basic site infrastructure. A tier 1 data center offers limited protection against physical events. It has single-capacity components and a single, nonredundant distribution path.
• Tier 2: Redundant-capacity component site infrastructure. This data center offers improved protection against physical events. It has redundant-capacity components and a single, nonredundant distribution path.
• Tier 3: Concurrently maintainable site infrastructure. This data center protects against virtually all physical events, providing redundant-capacity components and multiple independent distribution paths. Each component can be removed or replaced without disrupting services to end users.
• Tier 4: Fault-tolerant site infrastructure. This data center provides the highest levels of fault tolerance and redundancy. Redundant-capacity components and multiple independent distribution paths enable concurrent maintainability, and one fault anywhere in the installation doesn’t cause downtime.

Types of Data Centers

Many types of data centers and service models are available. Their classification depends on whether they are owned by one or many organizations, how they fit (if they fit) into the topology of other data centers, what technologies they use for computing and storage, and even their energy efficiency. There are four main types of data centers:

• Enterprise data centers: These are built, owned, and operated by companies and are optimized for their end users. Most often they are housed on the corporate campus.
• Managed services data centers: These data centers are managed by a third party (or a managed services provider) on behalf of a company. The company leases the equipment and infrastructure instead of buying it.
• Colocation data centers: In colocation (“colo”) data centers, a company rents space within a data center owned by others and located off company premises. The colocation data center hosts the infrastructure (building, cooling, bandwidth, security, and so on), while the company provides and manages the components, including servers, storage, and firewalls.
• Cloud data centers: In this off-premises form of data center, data and applications are hosted by a cloud services provider such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or IBM Cloud, or other public cloud provider.

Organizations can choose to build and maintain their own hybrid cloud data centers, lease space within colocation facilities (colos), consume shared compute and storage services, or use public cloud-based services. The net effect is that applications today no longer reside in just one place. They operate in multiple public and private clouds, managed offerings, and traditional environments. In this multicloud era, the data center has become vast and complex, geared to drive the ultimate user experience.