The data center is an infrastructure within an organization or a standalone facility for housing routers, servers, firewalls, and switches. It is also supposed to contain all other support systems for providing HVAC equipment, security, power, networking and operating staff.
Two types of data centers are available including a dedicated data center for catering to the needs of individual organization and a shared data center facility for use of multiple clients.
Data center facilities are intended to support all IT related operations of an enterprise. Due to high capital and operational expenses involved in the establishment and operation of a data center, most of the small, medium and even large sized organizations avail leased services of shared data centers.
The data center as a vital infrastructure for housing computer systems and related components including storage systems as well as networking infrastructure. Redundancy of utilities such as power, cooling, security and network connectivity are vital features of a data center.
The majority of data center services revolve around storage, processing, and dissemination of mission-critical information by ensuring utmost data integrity with help of physical and software security systems.
Management of a data center is a complex subject. It aims at optimum use of computing and other supporting resources for reliable maintenance of data storage systems and network communications efficient distribution of application workloads.