DATA CENTER KEYNOTE SPEAKER ON THE FUTURE OF CLOUD

A data center is a dedicated secure physical facility that centralizes an organization’s shared IT operations and equipment for managing, processing, storing, and disseminating large amounts of data. The nation’s top data centers house a network’s most critical systems and are vital to the continuous availability of an organization’s applications, services, and data.

Put simply: Leading data centers contain racks upon rows of servers and data storage systems. The hardware enables the resources for data processing, storage, networking and management. They also include redundant power supplies, environmental controls like air conditioning and fire suppression, specialized racks and cabling, and physical security barriers. All of these provisions work together to promote the high availability and uptime today’s computer networks require.

While early data centers were housed in retrofitted rooms without specialized engineering, modern data centers are purpose-built to optimize power management, cooling, protection and connectivity. Efficiency is paramount, as data center equipment generates substantial heat that must be removed to prevent systems from overheating. Ventilation, air conditioning capacity, back-up generators and uninterrupted power supply units ensure continuous operation.

Data center sizes vary greatly. While large-scale facilities operated by the likes of Google, Facebook and Apple capture headlines with their futuristic server farm construction, smaller data centers power most private company networks. Even individual server closets that house a few racks qualify as simple data centers. Larger centers may extend to tens of thousands of square feet, delivering compute and storage capacity scaled for immense workloads and numerous business units within a large enterprise.

Today’s data centers are divided into hot aisles and cold aisles to improve thermal management. Hot aisles face the back of the equipment and cold aisles face equipment fronts. Cold air intakes cooling hot exhaust air outputs for increased efficiency. Monitoring systems track runtime metrics like power usage, environmental conditions and data transmission rates for administrating system resources and capacity.

The backbone of the global digital economy, data centers will only expand in scale and technological sophistication moving forward. As more business infrastructure relies on cloud-based software and on-demand resource provisioning, data processing and data storage increasingly shifts from private confines behind corporate firewalls to expansive, multi-tenant data centers with redundancy and security as a service. Their non-stop operation enables our always-available, ubiquitous computing era.