A data center is a facility designed to store large amounts of equipment connected to computers, electronics and communications. Usually maintained by organizations in order to handle core operations in information services, including Internet connectivity, intranets, LANS, WANS, and extranets – practically every size of company, has some manner of data center. The most basic data center will have a computer network, including backup power supplies, air conditioning, and security applications, which amounts to a very large amount of data, stored in a large number of computers. Generally, the larger a company is, the larger the data center(s) will be. While larger companies may house their own data centers, smaller firms may opt to outsource its I.T. infrastructure or corporate computer information to a data center, suited to storing confidential, critical systems and business information.
It is important for a company to have access to a data center, logically, because this is where a great deal of the core equipment that is essential to its operations will be located. Much like the brain in a human body, without it, a company would not be able to run efficiently. Computers and communication elements, in addition to many other vital components, are what keep a business operating.
Internet Servers and Network Infrastructure
Also located inside of the data center, are various types of Internet servers. Data centers are often built and secured physically as well as logistically, to protect the equipment and data that they store. Security is an extremely important segment of a data center’s existence. Often designed as some of the most safe environments in a city, the main purpose of the data center is to maintain and run applications so that the businesses they serve, may access and manage data files effectively.
Network infrastructure communications in data centers are most often based on networks running the IP protocol suite. Data centers contain a set of routers and switches that transport traffic between the servers and to the outside world. Some of the servers at the data center are used for running the basic Internet and intranet services needed by internal users in the organization, such as email, proxy and DNS servers ( Domain Name System (or Service) – that translates domain names into IP addresses). Network security elements are also usually deployed, such as firewalls, VPN (virtual private network – a private data network that makes use of the public telecommunication infrastructure). Also commonplace, are network monitoring and application systems.
Security
While there are many types of information that may be stored in data centers, one example for a financial institution, would be essential, critical, security-dependent client accounts, including confidential numbers, and names, as well as business projects. A bank’s data center will usually have a mainframe or other kind of network, where its information and other data are stored. Another example is a university, which would include employee and student information, as well as data about the university’s physical holdings, such as buildings. Other information stored for a university, might be data on construction projects, as well as intellectual history. In addition, government institutions and companies that have multiple headquarters, as well as television, mobile phone, and other similar services, rely upon data centers heavily, to store and access a company or person’s critical data
It is important for a company to have access to a data center, logically, because this is where a great deal of the core equipment that is essential to its operations will be located. Much like the brain in a human body, without it, a company would not be able to run efficiently. Computers and communication elements, in addition to many other vital components, are what keep a business operating.
Internet Servers and Network Infrastructure
Also located inside of the data center, are various types of Internet servers. Data centers are often built and secured physically as well as logistically, to protect the equipment and data that they store. Security is an extremely important segment of a data center’s existence. Often designed as some of the most safe environments in a city, the main purpose of the data center is to maintain and run applications so that the businesses they serve, may access and manage data files effectively.
Network infrastructure communications in data centers are most often based on networks running the IP protocol suite. Data centers contain a set of routers and switches that transport traffic between the servers and to the outside world. Some of the servers at the data center are used for running the basic Internet and intranet services needed by internal users in the organization, such as email, proxy and DNS servers ( Domain Name System (or Service) – that translates domain names into IP addresses). Network security elements are also usually deployed, such as firewalls, VPN (virtual private network – a private data network that makes use of the public telecommunication infrastructure). Also commonplace, are network monitoring and application systems.
Security
While there are many types of information that may be stored in data centers, one example for a financial institution, would be essential, critical, security-dependent client accounts, including confidential numbers, and names, as well as business projects. A bank’s data center will usually have a mainframe or other kind of network, where its information and other data are stored. Another example is a university, which would include employee and student information, as well as data about the university’s physical holdings, such as buildings. Other information stored for a university, might be data on construction projects, as well as intellectual history. In addition, government institutions and companies that have multiple headquarters, as well as television, mobile phone, and other similar services, rely upon data centers heavily, to store and access a company or person’s critical data
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
