A data center or server farm is a centralized location of hundreds, sometimes thousands of powerful and small clustered servers and types of equipment running 24/7. A data center could be a single room, a building or a group of buildings depending on its volume. It facilitates the storage, processing, and distribution of large amounts of data across the network.
As the data processing needs are growing exponentially day by day, data centers have become a part of every organization to speed up data processing power. Not only data processing, but there are also multiple applications and benefits of these data centers like serving communications through email and messaging, cloud storage and many more.
A Data Center deployment can benefit an organization in multiple ways
High Availability of data
A data center involves numerous servers in an active cluster. Hence, in case of a hardware failure, the overall data access remains uninterrupted. Moreover, in such scenario, the load balancer automatically redirects the user to another active node available in the cluster. As a result, the downtime counts to zero.
Scalable performance
Each data center node increases concurrent accessibility of users without compromising the overall performance of the application. A data center enables users to dedicate nodes in the cluster to automate tasks or to route specific traffic. This, in turn, increases application throughput during the peak load hours.
Enhanced Scalability
The user can easily add on new nodes in a data center cluster without any downtime. There will be automatic sync up between existing nodes and new nodes without any interruption of service. So, it stores data more flexibly and securely.
Disaster Recovery
In case of a system outage, a data center acts as a standby. Though every organization follows their disaster recovery strategy, however with a data center they can share application indexes from production instance with disaster recovery backup systems. Along with that, it helps in copying the shared storage folders and database.
Cost saving
Data center immensely help organizations in cost reduction and operational expenditure with faster and more extensive bandwidth networking and easy recoverable connection at comparatively low cost. As the operational data performance and scalability enhances significantly with data centers, it helps in maximizing the business potential. As the overall operational costs reduced through the data center, organizations can get the scope to invest in better equipment and state-of-the-art servers.
An alternative to cloud solution
A cloud solution is an alternative to a traditional data center. However, data center advances cloud in many ways. For example, a cloud system is not fully auditable and does not provide full control. It costs organizations for extra storage bills. In case of the data center, organizations get an edge over these two points. Because with a data center an organization will have its own infrastructure with comparatively cheaper cost than cloud.
Environmental benefit
Data centers are beneficial concerning environmental footprints. They have the potentials to apply green technologies and energy savings technologies. Research shows in-house servers save 90% carbon footprints every year.
Improved SLAs
As the downtime cuts down automatically due to data centers, it ensures improved SLAs and better risk management.
Conclusion: From our above discussed we can conclude that a data center builds up the core of an organization’s information management system (IS). Thus, to achieve the maximum benefits out of data centers, a significant investment in the types of equipment and supporting systems are essential. Such systems may range anything from air conditioning or climate control systems to fire suppression or smoke detection.