Modern data centers are very
different than they were just a short time ago. Infrastructure has shifted from
traditional on-premises physical servers to virtual networks that support
applications and workloads across pools of physical infrastructure and into a
multicloud environment.
In this era, data exists and
is connected across multiple data centers, the edge, and public and private
clouds. The data center must be able to communicate across these multiple
sites, both on-premises and in the cloud. Even the public cloud is a collection
of data centers. When applications are hosted in the cloud, they are using data
center resources from the cloud provider.
In the world of enterprise
IT, data centers are designed to support business applications and activities
that include:
Email and file sharing
Productivity applications
Customer relationship
management (CRM)
Enterprise resource planning
(ERP) and databases
Big data, artificial
intelligence, and machine learning
Virtual desktops,
communications and collaboration services
Data center design includes routers, switches, firewalls, storage systems, servers, and application delivery controllers. Because these components store and manage business-critical data and applications, data center security is critical in data center design. Together, they provide:
Network infrastructure. This connects servers (physical and virtualized), data center services, storage, and external connectivity to end-user locations.
Storage infrastructure. Data
is the fuel of the modern data center. Storage systems are used to hold this
valuable commodity.
Computing resources. Applications are the engines of a data center. These servers provide the processing, memory, local storage, and network connectivity that drive applications.
