3rd generation Data Center
A Data Center is a specially conditioned space dedicated to locate a huge amount of devices (such a servers, data storage, processers, etc) to give a specific service to an enterprise, corporation or entity. Therefore, his main function is to process, store and distribute information.
These offered services could be: processing big amount of information, bind remote data, storing data, share information, hosting services, external backup, etc.
The owner company can use this data center, or can lease to others companies to use it and have resources on demand in function of its requirements at any time. In this way the clients could use what they need when they need, also known as “Pay as you go”. And in a very simple way because is very simple to realize topology changes thanks to their high flexibility.
Data Centers must conform to very strict standards about conditioning, physical security and virtual security, to provide high availability, data integrity and confidentiality. Moreover, it has to be designed applying redundancy on all of its parts. This patterns are standardized on different TIERs, defined for ANSI/TIA 942, where are classified in four categories: I, II, III and IV, where the last one is the most protected.
Note the requirement to provide high security measures to protect information, confidentially on most times.
This video brings us a better idea of the design and operation of a data center (in this case, a data center owned by GoDaddy):
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1zW81zbSoQ[/embed]
Finally, highlight the different design layers used at most cases:
- Location and conditioning
- Offered services design
- Quality of Service
- Security
- Management and flexibility