What is a data centre?
Colocation, cloud, edge – what does all this mean? What and where is my data centre, and does it even matter?
These days, if you’re in business, chances are you’re using a data centre. Any business using IT systems to connect with clients online, relies on a data centre.
In this post, the first in a series I’ll be writing on data centres, I get to basics and explain why it matters to your bottom line where your data is stored. In simple terms, I look at enterprise, colocation, cloud and edge data centres – and at the types your company might use to best run your IT systems.
What are data centres, and what do they do?
We live in an information age , where data is the new commodity and everyone is digitally connected. People, businesses and governments are always looking for more efficient ways to generate, process, move and store data.
Data centres are the heart of the information ecosystem. They physically house the servers and switches that process, store or move this data around. A data centre can be the size of a cupboard, a room or a building.
This isometric sketch from Schneider Electric shows the main building blocks that make up a data centre.
Early data centres
The first data centres were on-premise at universities and telephone companies, then banks and IT firms. These institutions were early adopters of computers, because part of their core business has always been processing, storing and managing large volumes of data. For example:
- Universities undertaking research that requires complex mathematical computations
- Telephone companies, connecting calls (pre-internet) for customers
- Banks keeping records and ledgers of their customers.
As the internet expanded, we’ve become more connected to people across the globe, needing to communicate and collaborate with them in a secure, fast way over the internet.
As our reliance grew, data centres grew in size and complexity.
How have data centres changed?
Until recently, most companies have run their own data centres from their office premises. We call these Enterprise data centres. But enterprise data centres are becoming more and more complicated and expensive to run: As our reliance on these systems and the computing power in servers and switches has grown, so have the power and cooling requirements and the size and complexity of these buildings.
Data centres have become separate rooms and buildings with 24/7/365 power and cooling supplies.
These days, many companies are outsourcing their data centre requirements to colocation and cloud operators. This trend is increasing exponentially and is set to continue.
Why would your company move its data from ‘on-premise’ to colocation or the cloud?
It all boils down to cost. Organisations decide to move from an on-premise enterprise data centres to colocation or cloud options (both of which I’ll explain in a bit) because it makes economic sense. As your business grows, the more expensive and complicated it is to run your own data centre. And when that’s not your field of expertise, it’s usually more efficient to have a data centre expert run your IT infrastructure for you.
At some point it becomes a no-brainer to transition to a specialist facility to take care of the technical data storage needs and know your data is in safe hands.
The journey from enterprise to colocation or cloud is never the same for any two organisations. Each has its unique requirements, at different times.
It’s a road full of learning, mistakes and (hopefully) triumph.
Colocation
In the late 1990s, banks were early colocation adopters. Banks were processing increasing amounts of data; the size of the data centres they owned and operated was getting bigger, more complex and more costly. Bankers were quick to realize that running data centres wasn’t their core business – and they needed a way to run this more efficiently.
This led to the birth of colocation, where a specialist colocation data centre firm builds and operates a data centre building that has:
- Resilient power and cooling that is on 24/7/365
- Connection to the outside world via numerous telecom carriers and their networks
- Along with de-regulation in the telecommunications industry and the rise of the ‘carrier neutral’ network environment, see this piece for more info on what a ‘carrier neutral’ environment is.
Here customers can install their own racks, servers and software, which can then be connected via the telecom/ISP operators in the data centre, to their office and the world.
The data centre customer leases space in the data centre based on the number of racks they need; effectively outsourcing operation of the data centre function.
Organisations like colocation for many reasons, like:
- Having an expert third party operate these complex systems
- Increased system resilience as IT applications and storage is mirrored across multiple data centres
- Moving costly assets off the balance sheet.
The cloud
Where colocation leases customers racks so they can install their own equipment and software, cloud operators build data centres including the racks and servers, then lease customers the use of this equipment and their software, e.g. AWS or Microsoft Office 365.
As bandwidth increased and network costs went down, software companies started offering a service: hosting their software on their servers ‘in the cloud’, rather than in a customer’s in-office servers. This allowed customers to reduce the number of racks at their office, and outsource some of their IT requirements to a third party.
At first this was common with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and accounting software and has now moved into full office software suites such as Microsoft Office. As with colocation, managers of businesses liked that, as it reduced IT infrastructure spend and moved costs off the balance sheet.
Interestingly, we’ve seen how this pendulum swings, as firms find the balance of reliance on the cloud and enterprise data centres in a hybrid model, keeping some computing in their enterprise data centre and some in colocation or the cloud.
The edge
The edge is the next frontier in data centres. There is no set definition on what it is yet – it seems to mean something different to everyone.
As we move to a more connected world where even more things create data and communicate with each other, the requirement for these things to operate at very low latency increases. This pushes the requirements to manage and move data closer to the customer or at ‘the edge’. In this scenario, small data centres must be located close to their customers so that they can manage this data at low latency.
This is a segment of the market that needs its own analysis, and I’ll delve into the edge in a future post.
Other data centres
In this piece, I focused on enterprise data centres and potential options for cloud and colocation. There are other types of data centres, which I won’t touch on here, such as:
- Telecom data centres – facilities that are usually owned and run by telecom companies to operate their telecom networks
- High Performance Computing (HPC) data centres – bespoke data centre facilities built to handle huge volumes of data and/or calculations, such as for weather forecasting.
Where to from here for your business?
The enterprise data centre has come a long way. Businesses now have plenty of options to run their IT systems more efficiently and at lower cost.
To do this optimally, it’s important to understand your business’s IT needs thoroughly, and deploy a data centre strategy that meets the growing demands of your customers.
A sound data centre strategy will leverage your existing assets and make use of the most flexible colocation or cloud option, so that you can grow your IT systems as your business does.
If you’d like to know more about this, or discuss your options for harnessing the power of colocation or the cloud…