Almost All Of Today’s Major Industries And Companies That Conduct Online Activities Rely On Computer Systems And Networks For Interacting With Customers, Storing Information, Accounting, And Daily Tasks. 

Systems and networks that provide secure access to resources and ensure that no unauthorized user is allowed access to the network. However, intra-organizational computer networks are facing a big problem.

Organizations’ hardware and software components need maintenance, and experts must deal with technical issues and fix security vulnerabilities.

However, most large companies prefer in-house data centers instead of public clouds.

What is a data center?

A data center refers to a closed environment consisting of servers and network equipment that organizations use to store their own or other companies’ critical applications. Maintaining security, high availability, and reliability are essential challenges for organizations that host data centers that provide different services to users and companies. A data center is of various hardware and software components, which can be divided into the following three general groupompute: In this section, there are hardware components such as main memory and central processor, and of course, the graphics processor, which provides the processing power needed to run applications. Typically, this processing power is supplied through efficient servers such as HP’s ProLiant DL380 servers. 

• Storage: The important organizational data of the data center is stored on various storage media, such as solid-state memories, hard disks, and magnetic tapes. 

• Networking: This section includes all communication channels and protocols and communication equipment such as routers, switches, network cables, and communication links that connect the data center with the outside world and allow employees of the organization to communicate with each other. 

These three main components play a vital role in continuing organizations’ business activities. For this reason, the reliability, availability, security, and integrity of data centers’ hardware and software components are critical.

In addition to those above, another critical point that we must mention is that software and hardware must be compatible with each other so that the services are optimally provided to the users. For example, if you install new versions of application software, such as virtualization products, on old servers, the heavy workload that enters the server may disrupt service delivery.

In addition to technical equipment, data centers need an infrastructure to launch and maintain hardware and software, including energy supply systems, emergency power supply equipment, ventilation, cooling systems, backup generators, and multiple cabling to achieve the principle of redundancy.

Why do data centers play an essential role in organizations?

Data centers are implemented with the aim of flexibility in business activities and earning money. In general, data centers provide the following functional services:

•  Providing email and file-sharing mechanisms.
•  Application hosting.
•  Customer relationship management (CRM).
•  Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and databases.
•  We are providing the necessary infrastructure for processing and maintaining big data with the aim of feeding and training machine learning models.
•  We provide virtual services such as desktops, servers, networks, etc.
•  We are providing the necessary infrastructure to host websites active in the field of e-commerce.

It does not matter what the field of work of an organization or company is because the smallest intra-organizational or extra-organizational activities of companies depend on data centers. This issue has caused most companies to invest heavily in reliable data centers and use the most advanced network, computing, and storage equipment.

Data centers are designed based on what principles?

Deciding how to design and implement data centers is not easy, as there are almost unlimited criteria to consider. Large companies and organizations typically have different data centers geographically located in other regions. This is done with the goal of greater flexibility in data backup and data protection against natural and artificial disasters such as floods, storms, and cyber threats. Among the key considerations that you should pay attention to when designing the architecture of data centers the following should be mentioned:

•  Does the organization need mirrored data centers?
•  What is the data center’s size, and how much space is available to deploy the data center?
•  How long does it take to solve the power outage problem?
•  Do we need to design a green data center?
•  Should you rent a private data center or use a colocation/managed service?
•  How much bandwidth is required, and approximately how much power does the equipment consume?
•  What physical security mechanisms do we need?

These fundamental questions help to determine the number of data centers, locations, and equipment required. For example, imagine a financial services company that has a lot of operations and could lose millions of dollars if faced with a power outage. To solve the above problem, this company has to implement two parallel data centers in two cities close to each other. In this case, if one of the data centers becomes unavailable, the secondary data center enters the circuit and manages the traffic load until the problem of the main data center is resolved.

While public clouds offer significant advantages, some medium or small companies prefer to implement a server room in their offices as a data center and use their internal servers instead of outsourcing data and business activities to third-party servers. The problem with the above method is that any outage and unavailability of the servers causes an interruption in business activities because a lot of time must be spent identifying and fixing the problem. Also, in the event of a hacker attack, restoring data from backups takes considerable time. In this case, the company loses its competitive advantage over its competitors.

How many types are data centers divided into?

• Enterprise data centers: These data centers are implemented by organizations for internal applications. Most of the big companies in the world of technology, like Microsoft and Google, use this type of data center. In general, data centers are divided into the following four main types:
• Colocation data centers: These types of the rental property provide customers with the space and resources needed to establish a data center. Typically, Internet service providers offer such services alongside their core activities.
• Data centers with managed services (Managed service data centers): These data centers prepare services such as data storage, computing, and other infrastructure services and provide them directly to customers. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM are well-known examples in this field.
• Cloud data centers: The cloud-based data center transfers a traditional data center from internal to external. To be more precise, instead of the organization using the interior data center services in a physical form, it uses all the services in a virtual format and through the cloud. In this case, organizations rent managed infrastructure provided by a third-party company and access that company’s data center resources through private networks or the Internet instead of managing their infrastructure.

Evolution of intra-organizational data center infrastructure

Data center infrastructure has seen significant changes in the last six decades and has experienced three major waves. The first wave was the change and migration from dedicated mainframes to servers based on x86 architecture, internal servers, and management of internal IT teams. The second wave was the widespread entry of virtualization technologies into the infrastructure, which allowed companies to provide physical resources in a virtual form to a wide range of users for the first time; This feature facilitated the possibility of better utilization and management of data center resources. The third wave that is going on is the migration from traditional infrastructure to the public cloud, hybrid cloud, and native cloud. In this wave, modern data centers have emerged to respond to the growing needs and fit the digital transformation.

Therefore, we must say that traditional internal data centers formed the infrastructure of the first and second waves. with time and the beginning of the third wave, the infrastructure of data centers shifted from physical servers to virtual servers, virtual networks, and multi-cloud environments so that the organizations kept all the information technology infrastructure needed for their business in place and physically. An approach that some companies still follow.

The above architecture provides end users with data through data centers, edge servers, and public and private clouds. An important issue to pay attention to is implementing a mechanism that establishes communication between data centers and cloud infrastructure. It is not harmful to know that the public cloud is a collection of data centers located in different geographical areas.

When applications are hosted in the cloud, they use the cloud service provider’s hardware equipment and data center resources. In summary, today’s modern data centers have shifted from on-premises physical infrastructure to a cloud infrastructure that virtualizes networks, applications, and workloads across multiple private and public clouds.

What are the characteristics of an advanced data center?

Statistics show that small and large companies are migrating widely from on-premise to cloud-based data centers. One of the important reasons in this field is the short time to deploy the virtual data center and reduce costs. A hypermetric data center has the following characteristics:

•  It is based on software-centric networks that manage network traffic through software solutions.
•  It supports infrastructure-as-a-service hosted on private and public clouds to make a collection of systems and system resources available to consumers on an on-demand basis.
•  It supports platform as a service and container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes so that developers and programmers can access the resources they need quickly and in the shortest time.
•  Infrastructure service providers for cloud data center deployment are responsible for maintaining and updating hardware and software equipment by the provisions of the service level agreement. More precisely, they guarantee users that the infrastructure and resources they have rented are always available. Based on the type of service they have purchased, they can control and monitor the infrastructure.

Migrating from an on-premise data center to a cloud does not mean transferring all business activities.

More precisely, most companies use a combination of on-premise and cloud data center members to achieve the highest performance and productivity. So that they work based on the model of hybrid cloud data centers.

Figure 1 shows how each of the hybrid cloud data center models changes the ownership of the data center and its infrastructure components from an organization-owned center to a service model.

In each of these models, the level of responsibilities and the description of duties of the customer and the service provider are different. For example, in the on-premises deployment model, in the left-hand column of Figure 1, all responsibility rests with the organization. In contrast, in the right-hand (SaaS) model, all responsibility rests with the organization providing the service, and the customer has only responsible for monitoring data. It stores in a cloud-based data center.

What are the differences between on-premise and cloud data centers?

Statistics show that almost all medium or large organizations have moved part of their infrastructure to the cloud because the cloud data center offers more advantages for maintainability and availability than the enterprise data center. Among the advantages and disadvantages of hypermetric data centers compared to internal data centers, the following should be mentioned:

• Scalability: Typically, enterprise data centers offer little scalability. Also, the process of expanding these data centers is time-consuming; This is because you not only need to purchase the appropriate equipment but also make changes to the network architecture so that clients can use the new resources. On the other hand, expanding cloud resources is quite simple, and you can add or subtract resources with just a few clicks. 

• Flexibility: The flexibility of administrative data centers is limited to purchasing resources or equipment that can be upgraded. Customers can quickly add or remove resources in a cloud-based infrastructure to meet their business needs.

• Cost: The cost of maintaining organizational data centers is extremely high. You need to spend significant money on equipment when you plan to set up a traditional data center. Next, you need to budget for equipment maintenance and upgrades. The cost of electricity and cooling equipment for a data center is extremely high. In contrast, when you use cloud-based data centers, you only pay for the services and resources you use. The important question is that if the total cost of setting up a data center is high, then why do cloud service providers provide these services to users at a low price? The answer lies in the number of subscribers. Cloud service providers have many subscribers, which directly impacts reducing the cost of using cloud services. 

• Availability: In the traditional data center, organizations have complete control over the infrastructure, which has advantages and disadvantages, but they have to do a lot of work and spend money to achieve the principle of availability. In the cloud, the service provider guarantees availability in a service-level agreement. More precisely, the service provider guarantees the highest level of security and availability. 

• Security: In the cloud space, the cloud service provider is responsible for protecting a significant part of the infrastructure according to the service level contract. However, some tasks, such as backing up data or encrypting it, are the customers’ responsibility. 

last word

As we mentioned, the data center is a place that hosts various equipment, such as network servers and storage equipment, that are implemented and used for processing, storing, and sharing data based on one or more specific topologies. Data centers are the beating heart of today’s economy, and all companies active in online activities use data center services in some way.

Accordingly, the subject of security and monitoring of data stored in data centers is vital. An important thing to remember as a data center customer is always to back up your data so that if access to the data center is not possible for any reason, you can access a local copy of the data.