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Data Centers
Data centers were first established in 1996 when the internet
boom was beginning. Exodus was the first company off the block
and the company did exceedingly well till the dotcom bust almost
wiped it out.
The concept of a data center is one where an organization puts
together computing resources including services, network devices
and other environment handling equipment to create a unit that
can host applications and data and deliver it over the internet
to users accessing it. The data center puts together a large
investment and divides this cost of common services across a
number of customers who then host their applications and data
in the data center.
The data center reduces the need for expensive investments that
need to be made to setup computing resources for internet delivery
for a captive application.
Data centers started becoming popular when leading services
including Yahoo and Google started using them instead of setting
up infrastructure of their own. Companies started accepting
that their data and applications would be entrusted to a service
provider and would be physically present outside their own premises.
Data centers offer protection and assurance of a very high level
and achieving this for a captive application will need a very
large investment and ongoing operations and maintenance expenditure.
Businesses can however get all these features for a smaller
shared cost by outsourcing this to a data center.
The data center creates a highly secure infrastructure with
a large amount of redundancy to assure uptime. Most data centers
are designed for extreme conditions and disasters including
earthquakes and other nature elements and terrorist attacks.
These data centers also create a lot of redundancy in power
systems, bandwidth connectivity and local conditions. Many data
center organizations have centers located in different cities
and countries and can move applications and data between them
with very short timeframes, providing higher security against
disasters.
When the 911 attacks took place on New York, companies that
had offices in the World Trade Center towers were able to get
back into operation in minutes thanks to their use of data centers
and disaster protection measures.
Data centers are also equipped with a number of security provisions
for physical and remote intrusions. Biometric devices and round-the-clock
monitoring of personnel ensures that unauthorized entries and
access to the devices is avoided. Anti-virus tools, intrusion
detection methods and firewalls at the data centers protect
from remote attacks and intrusions.
Data centers will become repositories of data and applications
and will serve as methods by which companies can ensure business
continuity and disaster protection. Data centers will also enable
organizations to use resources across the world more effectively
and guard against geo-political risks.
Data centers offer hosting services, co-location of servers
and devices, maintenance and management services and others.
Hosting services provide complete infrastructure for hosting
of applications and data. The customer needs to only install
software and data and begin use.
Co-location gives the customer the ability to place their own
computing infrastructure such as servers, data storage and backup
devices at data centers and gain from the security and uptime
assurance that data centers offer. Many businesses prefer this
since it dedicates computing and storage resources for their
use and allows them to configure and customize these to suit
their requirements.
Maintenance and management services are offered by data centers
and enable businesses to outsource the complete management of
their applications and data management of these data centers.
Global Leaders in Data Centers include
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