What is a data centre? A data centre is a building which is full of lots of computers called servers. So who else lives there? Pretty much the whole Internet does. Fortnite, YouTube, Google, Facebook, Xbox Live, Sims, and Roblox all live in data centres around the world. Impressive, right? So what else is in a data centre? Let’s have a look.
What does a data center consist of?
Well, the servers or computers all get stacked up in cabinets called racks, and they all line up in rows. Some data centres have thousands of servers and can be bigger than football pitches. The design of a data centre varies depending on the needs of the individual enterprise customer and the cloud providers’ delivery of the service.
Regardless of individual cases, however, most data centre infrastructures include firewalls, routers, switches, storage systems, application delivery controllers, and servers.
Functions of a data center
All these components work together to provide organizations with applications that help to reduce and control the workload and improve the overall efficiency of operations.
In addition, this infrastructure provides users with network infrastructure to connect data centre servers, storage infrastructure to manage and store data, memory space and local storage.
How does a data center work?
Data centres need two very important things, electricity and a way to keep everything cool. Data centres will have massive engines called generators, which can keep the whole data centre running in the event of a power cut.
Regardless of individual cases, however, most data centre infrastructures include firewalls, routers, switches, storage systems, application delivery controllers, and servers. You can learn more about data centres here.
It takes a little time for the engines to start up, so if there is a power cut, they have huge batteries which can keep everything going in between. Some of these battery packs are as big as your house. Check out https://beeksgroup.com/network/data-centres/interxion-london-lon1/ to find out more.
Why is a cooling system important for a data center?
You know, when you use your laptop, tablet, or phone, and after a while, it gets warm. If you can imagine one million of those, that’s what happens in a data centre. All of the computers make so much heat the building has to keep it cool, or the equipment would break.
Depending on where in the world the data centre is, the way it is cooled can differ. But most are like the type of air conditioning, the same as in a car. Hot air is cooled down by the water, and that makes the air cold again. Some data centres do some really cool stuff with their hot air, like using it to heat houses or even swimming pools—very, very cool stuff, in my opinion.
How is data transferred?
OK, so now you have an idea of how the data centre works, but how do you get it to your house? Well, that is the Internet. The whole world is connected by cables that run under the sea and under the ground. These cables carry data at incredible speeds.
A message can travel from London to New York in 71 milliseconds. That is seven round trips to New York every second. Once the data reaches your house or classroom, it is normally then sent by wireless or Wi-Fi to your device.
So everything happens automatically? Kind of, but only if the data center has been designed and built well and looked after properly. Of course, the people who do this, engineers and technicians, fix things when they break, and they check on everything regularly to test if everything is working fine.
Conclusion
To sum it up, a data center is a centralized location where computers and network equipment are used for the purpose of storing, managing, distributing, processing, collecting, and providing access to large amounts of data from all over the world.