What is an enterprise data center?
An enterprise data center is a physical facility that houses an organization’s routers, switches, servers, firewalls, and other components that enable critical applications and store and process data.
Data centers are critical for businesses and companies to run their everyday operations. All the important applications, services and data are processed and stored in a data center.
What are components of an enterprise data center?
- Server infrastructure – Racks, blades, and the different types of servers used to store data and applications.
- Network infrastructure – Routers, switches, security devices, and firewalls that enable seamless communication and data transfer throughout the system.
- Storage infrastructure – Where data and files are stored.
- Support infrastructure – Power supplies, cabling, cooling, environment monitoring, and ventilation that allow data centers to run night and day.
How are enterprise data center deployments evolving?
In the past, enterprise data centers were typically owned and built on-premises by an organization for their own use. Many organizations have started leveraging colocation and cloud providers to support their data center and hybrid cloud deployment requirements.
Colocation data centers are owned by a data center provider who rents out the space for organizations in need. The host takes care of the infrastructure, equipment, cooling, etc., while the organization renting is responsible for the components such as firewalls, networking, and storage.
Managed service data centers are managed by a third party. Companies lease the infrastructure and services.
Hybrid cloud data center is a mixed computing environment where applications are run using a combination of computing, storage, and services in different environments—public clouds and private clouds, including on-premises data centers or “edge” locations. Hybrid cloud computing approaches are widespread because almost no one today relies entirely on a single public cloud.
What is private cloud?
A private cloud is an on-site cloud computing architecture that is accessible and managed by a single enterprise or organization, offering virtual processing and storage resources. It provides cloud computing benefits with high security and control of on-premises IT infrastructure. The main benefits include resource customization, flexibility, scalability, quick delivery, and access controls.
Private cloud is also known as single-tenant or isolated access, as all the computing resources are available to a dedicated customer. It is generally hosted on-premises in the data center of an organization but in some cases, it can be hosted at an autonomous data center. Virtual private cloud allows users to provision and configure the servers virtually and access computing resources on demand to facilitate optimal resource utilization.
Private cloud vs. public cloud vs. hybrid cloud
Private clouds are often dedicated to one group or tenant, offering more opportunities for customization, access, and security—at a higher upfront cost. Compared to public cloud offerings, private cloud capacity can be much more or much less scalable, depending on the infrastructure and the predictability of the change in demand.
Public cloud services are managed by a third-party provider at a remote location, offering highly flexible and scalable cloud resources for multiple organizations. The third-party provider manages and secures all resources or storage for an agreed-upon rate. The primary trade-off is visibility, access, and customization for enhanced, on-demand agility.
Hybrid cloud infrastructures combine elements of public cloud and private cloud. Here, an enterprise offloads certain resources to a third-party provider while keeping select infrastructure on site. Doing so increases a company’s ability to control, access, and manage its data and hardware, especially for varied workloads, and meet stringent security or privacy requirements.
What are hyperscale data centers
Hyperscale data centers, also known as cloud data centers, are massive, centralized, and custom-built facilities that are operated by a single company. These facilities support primarily cloud service providers (CSPs) and large internet companies with enormous compute, storage, and networking requirements. In terms of footprint, hyperscale data centers house thousands of racks and tens of thousands of servers across 50,000 to 1+ million square feet. As such, these facilities can cost upwards of $1 billion to construct.
Hyperscale data centers can be insourced or self-built by the “hyperscalers”, which include companies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Meta Platforms (Facebook).
