Over the past 25 years, the evolution of the data center has a large impact on the pace of massive technological revolutions transforming the IT industry as a whole. Starting with the dot-com period to the cloud and virtualization era to today’s Software-defined Datacenter revolution, IT data centers have continually evolved.
Moving from siloed architectures with a dedicated system to virtualized and cloud-based models that pool together compute, network, and storage resources, software-defined data centers are poised to increase business agility in the future.
What is Data Center?
A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. It generally included redundant or backup power supplies, redundant data communications connection, environmental controls (e.g. Air conditioning, fire suppression), and various security devices.
Most small business owners keep their servers if they have one, on a shelf in the corner of the office, or perhaps locked in the stationery cupboard. They might have it connect to a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) so that if the electricity goes down the server will still keep on working. This may also support the broadband router which connects the server to the big wide world. It definitely doesn’t help if the broadband line goes down for any reason – someone stealing the copper for example.
These days the Internet connection is a mission-critical tool for most businesses so what do you do if the line goes down?
What can you do is keep your important server or servers off-site at a data center. This has some quite major benefits:
The server is going to be kept in a secure environment that is prepared for the eventuality of power cuts.
Data centers are secure. They will typically be manned 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
The data center will have multiple bandwidths and geographically diverse fiber connections to the Internet.
Great technical support from the service provider will help you to maintain your system.
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas), Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-service (SaaS).
The name cloud was inspired by the symbol that’s often used to represent the Internet in flowcharts and diagrams.
Cloud computing enables companies to consume compute resources as a utility – just like electricity – rather than having to build and maintain computing infrastructure in-house.
The public cloud is big, private cloud is bigger. This year, 25% of respondents said they are adopting public cloud, up from 16% last year. And 49% are deploying private clouds, up from 35% last year.
The data center’s budgets are on the rise. When asked which initiative their company will implement in 2015, 40% of respondents said data center consolidation. According to a recent survey: enterprises plan to spend more on data centers – Data Center Knowledge
Asia is hot, hot, and hot for data centers. An impressive 55% of Asian companies responding said their budgets are up more than 10% this year.
Data centers are running out of headroom. Nearly one-third of those responding said their companies would run out of capacity in at least one of their sites this calendar year. Among the Asian respondents, a whopping 86% said they’d built a site “recently” but 35% said they are running into capacity constraints in their existing sites.
Expert Views: IBM invested $4 billion in Datacenter, it returns as $40billion in 2018.
Workload shift from Traditional Data Centers to cloud data centers.
Definitions:
Datacenter to the user: Traffic that flows from the data center to end-users through the Internet or IP WAN
Datacenter to the data center: Traffic that flows from one data center to other data center
Within the data center: Traffic that remains within the data center.
Consumer: Traffic originating with or destined for business end-users.
Cloud data center: Traffic associated with cloud consumer and business applications.
Traditional data center: Traffic associated with non-cloud consumer and business application.
