What is a data centre and what different types of data centres exist?
Data centres centralise the storage of data and are connection points for the digital infrastructure. Also known as data centers or datacenters, these buildings are indispensable for the structure needed to share and consume data.
What is a data centre?
Scrolling through social media, having an online meeting or playing a video game are daily activities that require data and digital infrastructure. This daily requirement for data is even higher at a company level. Think about data needed for webshops, medical research or financial institutions. All this required data needs to be stored, processed and distributed somewhere. This happens in data centres.Organisations can house their IT infrastructure in data centres. Here, computer servers filled with server racks with digital applications can run uninterrupted to support all the digital activities society and business requires.
Key attributes of data centres
Uninterrupted availability
A data centre must never fail to ensure that all organisational and personal digital activities run without interruption. When there is an outage, organisations and their services will go down. For example, financial transactions won’t go through, websites and webshops may be down, or online meeting connections are lost. It is therefore essential to mitigate risks to ensure the uninterrupted availability of a data centre.Ensuring
security
In data centres, large volumes of data are processed and stored. This data concerns privacy-sensitive information, for example, transaction details of an organisation or health records. Leakage of this data could impose large privacy risks. Securely processing data and ensuring security is therefore crucial in data centres.Increasing
connectivity
The last key attribute concerns connectivity. The faster information and data can be delivered, the better the user experience will be. On the other hand, if the connectivity is bad and it takes, for example, over 10 seconds to load a website, users usually will lose their attention. It is thus important to supply good connectivity.What is in a data centre?
A data centre consists mainly of spaces reserved for computer servers and IT equipment. This is called the white space of a data centre. The name ‘white space’ originated from the white tiles on the raised floor. White space currently describes the available square meters for computer servers and IT equipment.To support the IT equipment, infrastructure for powering and cooling is needed. ‘Grey space’ in a data centre refers to the space needed to store this back-end infrastructure needed for data centre operations. This includes the electrical and mechanical infrastructure for powering and cooling the IT equipment. For example, generators, chillers, transformers, switchgear and backup power supplies.
In a data centre, there are also facilities to ensure a secure environment. For example fences around the data halls and the data centre or security systems to enter the white space. Generally, there are some operational spaces in a data centre as well. This includes office space and meeting rooms.
What are the different types of data centres?
There are several types of data centres. The different types are based on data centre ownership, size, and location. Below, the four main types of data centres will be discussed.Enterprise data centres
The first main type of data centre is an enterprise data centre, also called an onsite or on-premises data centre. This includes data centres that are housed within an organisation or organisational campus and held by an organisation itself.The size range of these data centres is broad, depending on the services an organisation provides, ranging from only a small server room to an enormous, privately held data centre. As it can be too expensive to organise the IT infrastructure by the organisation itself, renting or leasing space in a colocation facility is also possible.
Colocation data centres
Colocation facilities are the second type of data centre. Colocation companies facilitate organisations’ digital infrastructure by renting out data centre space. Supplying the space, energy, internet connection, cooling, physical security and maintenance of the data centre are core facilities provided by colocation companies.Organisations can rent or lease white space. Since colocation companies specialise in the maintenance and innovation of data centres, leasing spaces can significantly decrease costs for organisations that don’t have the resources to provide these specialised data centre services for themselves. In addition, by bringing together IT equipment from different organisations into one data centre, cooling and backup power supplies can be arranged more efficiently.
Hyperscale data centre
The previous type of data centres focuses on the ownership of a data centre, while the hyperscale data centres are all about size. To be qualified as a hyperscale data centre, the facility should exceed a certain number of servers, square meters, and data processing volume. The term hyperscale refers to the IT load the data centre can facilitate.This type of data centre is typically privately held. Hyperscale data centres are not only significantly bigger than colocated data centres but can also outperform smaller data centres in efficiency. With a larger surface area and more servers, hyperscalers can make use of economies of scale and customer engineering.
Edge data centre (EDC)
The next type of data centre is defined by its location. Closest to the edge of the network, edge data centres are located near the end-user. This reduces the data transfer delay, also called latency, increasing speed and thus resulting in a better client experience.Edge data centres are used for applications that are built on guaranteed response times. Examples include both private and organisational applications, like drones, VR games, medical machinery, public safety applications or and self-driving cars. These applications require low latency for a good user experience.
Typically, these edge data centres are smaller than regular data centres. They are generally connected with a larger, central data centre or other edge data centres. Data that is less critical to be processed directly can then be transferred to a central data centre.
To sum up, data centres are cornerstones of our digital infrastructure. Data centres store, process and distribute data for organisations and end-users. There are four main data centre types. These can be distinguished by ownership (privately or held by a service provider), size (small, regular or enormous) and location (close to the end-user or distant). An organisation’s needs and wishes for its IT infrastructure determine the best fit regarding the type of data centre used.
