While your requirements for a home or work computer might seem reasonable.
Even a reasonably sized company will have data storage requirements in the dozens to hundreds of terabytes.
In smaller environments, this may be a server room.
Still, they are referred to as data centers when capacity needs to scale higher than a small room.
Contents
What Are the Purposes and the Advantages of a Data Center?
A data center is intended to be a consistently available centralized data store.
Grouping together the core internet infrastructure makes performing several core tasks significantly easier and more efficient.
One core factor is connectivity.
Latency and bandwidth are easier to optimize over short distances, allowing maximum web link performance.
The core computing hardware also needs external infrastructure to facilitate its safe and continuous operation.
Reliable power, cooling, connectivity, and safety systems are all expensive.
What Does a Data Center Require?
The core part of any data center is the actual computing hardware.
This typically comes in the form of server racks.
Each rack is a standard size and can take multiple standard-sized computing devices.
Most server racks are 42 or 48U high, with 48U racks also called seven-foot racks.
The data in the data center needs to be accessible, generally constantly.
For this reason, high-speed networking both internally and to the outside world is expected.
Its functionality can instantly be picked up by a secondary machine.
The power supply also has a series of backups, including Uninterruptible Power Supplies or UPSs.
Like all computing devices, data centers require cooling.
With so much electricity and heat, theres always a chance of fire.
Instead, inert gasses are generally used.
The primary choice used to be Halon until that was found to be bad for the ozone layer.
Modern systems typically use nitrogen.
While this is highly effective at putting out fires, its also deadly.
In a nitrogen-rich-oxygen-poor atmosphere, you might pass out from asphyxiation in seconds.
Nitrogen is colorless, odorless, and tasteless, so there is no warning of danger.
Data centers often have raised floors.
This provides many advantages.
Raised floors also allow cables to be run under the floor.
However, many choose to run overhead cabling to make access easier.
This also provides a convenient method for providing cool air when combined with porous floor tiles.
Data centers allow short cables and often run longer cables overhead.
By positioning aisles of server racks in alternating directions, its possible to create cold and hot aisles.
This layout helps to optimize the provision of HVAC resources.
Hyperscalers and Colocation
Implementing all the infrastructure of a data center is expensive.
This can be especially difficult for companies with extensive data and processing requirements but currently limited funds.
Data centers with multiple tenants like this are referred to as colocation.
Especially in colocation environments, security is essential.
With lots of potentially sensitive data from multiple parties, data pipe and physical security are important.
Physical access is often complex to arrange, often requiring authorization in advance.
Data centers often have many layers of physical security, including cages around server racks.
Many of the biggest data centers are owned by hyperscalers.
These are huge tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.
They buy massive amounts of hardware and, in some cases, lease access to it.
In their cases, access is typically virtualized rather than physical.
Virtualization can offer improved efficiency in the use of system resources and can enable easy scaling when needed.
Location and Other Factors
The location of a data center is essential.
Its critical to be near a large power source, high-speed networking infrastructure hub, and physical transport infrastructure.
Other considerations include environmental hazards, such as earthquakes, volcanos, floods, and hurricanes.
The climate is also a big factor.
Cooler locations have lower ambient air temperatures, requiring less cooling before being supplied into the data center.
This helps to reduce operating costs.
In some tests, small data centers have even been placed underwater.
They have used the cool flowing water currents to provide even more effective and cheaper cooling.
Modularity is also a critical factor.
Over time computing hardware advances, and current technologies become obsolete.
Obsolete hardware is often both less performant and less energy efficient.
This then requires a regular upgrade cycle.
Modularity enables constant rolling upgrades, spreading the upfront costs over multiple annual budgets.
It also allows continuous uptime with no service interruption, even when performing large-scale upgrades.
Storage capacity is also a significant factor.
While large data centers can be cost-effective, its generally empirically cheaper to need less space.
Data center owners, especially hyper scalers, often spend fortunes on extremely high-density storage mediums.
Still, many more server racks and disk servers are needed to provide the same total storage capacity.
This increases space and often power costs and requires additional cooling etc.
This economy of scale is why many huge storage drives that are super expensive are available.
Theyre not meant for the average consumer.
Theyre meant for hyperscalers that will pay almost anything for improved space efficiency.
Conclusion
Data centers are the larger cousin of the server room.
This allows for economies of scale to kick in and simplifies connectivity.
There are many design factors in data center design.
However, data centers have to be huge to take true advantage of the economies of scale.
Data centers are often located in custom-built facilities.
However, some reuse unused office space, and some are even situated in old new nuclear bunkers.
