What are data centers, what are they for and how are they made

If absurdly you were to decide to build a data center from scratchyou would have the burden of thinking of a structure capable of hosting all the IT infrastructure necessary to run applications, manage data and provide digital services in a continuous, secure and efficient way. This is because a data center is a building where they find space serversystems storage, network equipment And support infrastructure which make the system complex and functional. Its primary function is to centralize the IT resources of a company or a cloud provider, making it possible to reduce management costs, increase operational resilience and guarantee continuity in the event of failures or emergencies. Inside, the calculation is entrusted to servers of various types – from rack servers to blades up to mainframes – while storage can make use of local solutions (DAS), networked (NAS) or organized into more complex systems such as SAN. There netcomposed of switches, routers and high-speed cables, ensures communication between servers and users, while redundant power systems, such as uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), reserve generators and cooling systems, maintain constant operations over time.

Managing a data center also requires advanced physical and cybersecurity strategies, environmental controls over temperature, humidity and static electricity, and centralized monitoring tools. The design must comply with redundancy and reliability standards defined by international bodies that establish increasing levels of fault tolerance and intervention capacity during maintenance. Let’s delve deeper into everything by taking a closer look how a data center is made.

The essential components of a data center

To build a data center from scratch, the first thing to consider is the physical space and arrangement of the equipment, which are multiple. Let’s delve deeper into this aspect by looking a little more closely how a data center is made.

Server

THE serverpowerful computers that represent the heart of computing in a data center, can be of various types.

• THE server rackswhich are wide and flat (like pizza boxes) are stacked on top of each other in racks (i.e. in modular structures that serve to organize and protect electronic and IT components) and each of these servers is equipped with network ports, power and ventilation systems.
• THE blade server instead, they allow you to concentrate multiple units in the same chassis, saving even more space than rack servers and reducing energy consumption.
• In cases of extremely intensive workloads, i mainframe they offer superior processing power: just think that they can process billions of calculations and transactions in real time, in fact, supporting the workload of an entire room of servers mounted on racks or blade servers.

Storage and network infrastructures

The storageor thestorage infrastructurecan be local to each server via DAS (Direct-Attached Storage), distributed on NAS (Network-Attached Storage), which allows shared access to files or of type SAN (Storage Area Network), block storage networks capable of managing large amounts of data in a centralized manner. THE’internal network infrastructureexploiting a large quantity of network devices (e.g. cables, switches, routers and firewalls) connects each server, storage device and support equipment, guaranteeing fast transfers both within the data center (between server and storage, the so-called “east/west traffic”) both towards end users or other company offices (therefore between server and client, transfer also known as “north/south traffic”).

For them hyperscale installationsthe required bandwidth can range from tens of gigabits up to several terabits per second. For the record, hyperscale data centers are larger than “traditional” data centers, as they can occupy an area of ​​thousands of square meters and host something like 5,000 servers. The largest cloud data centers are operated by large cloud service providers, such as the well-known AWS (Amazon Web Services), Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud And Microsoft Azure.

Power and cooling

A critical element in any self-respecting data center is the power and cooling management. Each data center must always be operational, and therefore equipped with dual power, static uninterruptible power supplies or UPS to protect against surges or short interruptions e back-up generators for prolonged blackouts. There redundancyin a data center, is fundamental: duplicate or multiple components, RAID storage systemsbackup cooling systems and, for large organizations, data centers in separate geographic regions, allow operations to be maintained even in the event of breakdowns or natural disasters affecting certain geographic areas. THE cooling systems they maintain the temperature of the servers in optimal ranges through air systems or CRACK (Computer Room Air Conditioning) or via di liquid cooling systemsincreasingly popular for energy efficiency. Humidity and static electricity are monitored to prevent damage, and fire and physical security systems protect critical assets.

Virtualization

From an architectural perspective, modern data centers take advantage of the virtualizationseparating the software from the hardware and allowing you to bundle CPU, storage and network into flexible, programmable resources. This mode allows you to implement software-defined infrastructures (SDI) or entirely software-defined (SDDC), optimizing costs and performance, rapidly deploying services and scaling the infrastructure without the need to physically intervene on the hardware. Cloud models, both private and public, offer infrastructure, platform or software as a service (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), while the edge data centers (EDC) bring applications closer to users, reducing latency and improving the performance of AI, big data and streaming content. The combination of virtualization, SDI and intelligent management allows you to better utilize available resources, rapidly deploy applications, scale as needed, and support cloud-native application development.

The standards to be respected when designing a data center

There data center design must respect international standards of redundancy and reliability. THE’Uptime Institutefor example, defines these standards in four levels:

1. Level I: a Tier I data center provides core components with redundancy capabilities, such as uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and 24/7 cooling, so you can support IT operations in an office environment and beyond. Tier I data centers have a maximum annual downtime of 29 hours.
2. Level II: in addition to what is already provided for in level I data centers, additional redundant power and cooling subsystems are provided here, such as generators and energy storage devices, so as to offer greater security against interruptions. At this level there is a maximum annual downtime of 22 hours.
3. Level III: as you can imagine, going up to this level offers even more efficiency and even longer uptime, with annual downtime dropping to 1.6 hours per year. A similar result is guaranteed by the presence of a greater number of redundant components. Additionally, Tier III data centers do not need to be shut down for maintenance or component replacement.
4. Level IV: with just 26 minutes of downtime per year, this level offers near-continuous data center uptime. In this level we have total fault tolerance due to several redundant capacity components that are independent and physically isolated, so that the failure of one piece of equipment has no impact on IT operations.