A data center is a physical structure that businesses use to house their business-critical applications and data. As they progress from centralized on-site facilities to edge deployments to public hybrid cloud solutions, it’s critical to think long-term regarding how to maintain their dependability and security.

What is a data center?

Data centers are usually considered a singular thing, however, in truth, they are made out of a number of technical components. These come under three broad categories:

Compute: The memory & processing power to let applications run properly, normally provided by high-tech line servers

Storage: Critical enterprise data is specifically housed in a data center, on media spanning, a tape to solid-state drives, with multifold backups.

Networking: Interconnections between data center elements and to the world outside, apart from routers, switches, application delivery controllers, etc.

These are the elements that IT requires to store and manage critical resources that are crucial to the nonstop operations of a business. As a result, the dependability, efficiency, security, and continuous evolution of data centers are basically a high priority. Both software and hardware security measures are necessary.

The role of cloud

Earlier, companies had a choice of building their on-site data center or utilizing a hosting vendor or a managed service provider. Treading the latter routes shifted ownership and the economics of running a server farm, however the long lead times needed to send and deal with the innovation actually remained.

The ascendance of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from cloud providers has provided companies a choice where they can provision a virtual data center in the cloud with only a couple of mouse clicks.

In 2020, going by the trends companies spent more annually on cloud infrastructure services, than they did on physical data center equipment, and 50% or more servers sold went into global cloud connect data centers.

Many businesses are eating both the cake and the cherry by utilizing a hybrid cloud approach, where a few workloads are offloaded to a public cloud while others that require more involved control or security is kept running in the local data center.

Hyper Converged infrastructure (HCI)

One of the operational bottlenecks of data center networking is cobbling together the right combination of servers, storage, and networks to support demanding applications.

Once the infrastructure is in place, IT operations have to identify ways to scale up rapidly, without disrupting the application. HCI makes it easy by offering user-friendly gadgets, based on commodity hardware that can scale out by way of fitting in more nodes into the deployment. HCI is offered by many high-end vendors.

Conclusion

Data centers have always been key to the success of enterprises of any size, and that won’t change. But, the ways to deploy a data center and the enabling technologies are going through a major shift.

To create a roadmap to the future data center, remember that the world is getting dynamic and distributed. Technologies that speed ups that shift are the ones that will be needed in the future.