Data Centers are facilities that house thousands of computer systems that are connected to each other to support variety of high computing and storage needs. A data center includes the computers, networking connections, communications connections, backup power supply, security devices, coolers, and other supplies which hold all these together.
Data-centers were born from the time when the first computers which were the size of a room were commercialized. These computers where complex to maintain and operates. They were a puzzle of wires, connectors, racks and required special environment to operate in. Along with this there were power black holes who asked for huge amounts of power. Although after the miniaturization of computers these components became smaller but the requirements of big companies and institutions kept growing which called for accumulation of these computer together to perform huge processes and handle unbelievable amounts of data. The part of business continuity made the use of data centers a necessity.
Modern data centers have to handle all the operation of a organization and at the same time be secure. Under any circumstances when the data centers are offline even for a little while, they will cause huge losses to the company interns of information loss and loss of employee wages. This called for data centers to maintain a high standard of functionality and integrity. In modern data centers optical fibers help in integrating the different computers and the emergency backup power units keep the data centers continuously up. Along with this there is a requirement of data centers to be standardized. Standardization has the benefit of efficiency in construction and can lead to savings while engineering. Data centers are classified into the kind of infrastructure requirement provided to the data center. The data center with the lowest infrastructure requirements is the Tier 1 data center and the one with the most stringent requirements like hosting mission-critical computer systems and even biometric protected access zones.
