A Quick Guide To Data Centres
What Are Data Centres?
Data centres house the servers and/or data storage that organisations use. In the data centre is the infrastructure and equipment to power and manage the servers and storage too. This equipment is what allows businesses to share information, storage drives and email applications across all staff.
As of September 2022, there are over 6,000 data centres in the world, with the most (2,701) in the US. The UK has the third highest amount at 456, just under Germany who have 487. It is preferential to build data centres in areas of stable climates and a low likelihood of natural disasters, as well as sympathetic government regulations and level of demand. There is usually a higher concentration of data centres in cities with busy financial districts.
What Are The Different Types Of Data Centres?
There are different types and sizes of data centres. Depending on the size of the organisation, a data centre could be a small room within a business, or a massive warehouse used solely as a data centre. A data centre located within the business, is an on-premises data centre. These are becoming less common with the advent of cloud servers and storage. Many of the big financial companies in places like central London, do still have big data centres on the premises.
Onsite data centres keep the financial information communicated as close to real-time as is possible. A cloud data centre is still a data centre, but it is located away from the business it serves and uses the internet to deliver their services. There is some confusion that because it is cloud based, there must be no physical site. However, cloud services do still need physical equipment and people looking after in a data centre. Hybrid data centres are an on-premises and cloud data centre operating the network used by an organisation. This means employers can access the on-premises data when at work, but if working from home, will need to use cloud storage to access company info.
The benefit of operating like this is that network administrators can restrict what information is available outside of the business on-premises network. Another option is to duplicate onto both for employers who work on site and those who work remotely to access. One downside to having the on-premises data centre, was when COVID-19 forced working from home on many businesses, staff could not access what they needed to. This led to a boom in cloud-based data centres.
Any data centre that isn’t located within the business using it, is remote. This doesn’t always mean far away. Sometimes data centres are located within the same town. Others, service networks on the other side of the world. Before cloud software, organisations had their data centre on the premises, and it was only for them to use. Because of cloud technology, companies can rent their data centre out to reduce the need for on-premises infrastructure. This is a colocation data centre. Small data centres that are purposefully located near to the users are known as edge data centres.
A hyperscale data centre is huge and scalable. These are often operated by large companies such as Microsoft and are designed to be able to grow with demand. A data centre can be more than one of these labels. A hyperscale data centre belonging to Microsoft, for example, is also a colocation, cloud-based data centre. Companies use Microsoft’s Azure product to access their own secure network.
What Problems Are Data Centres Facing?
Data centres use a great deal of energy, especially because they need uninterrupted power to operate 24/7. Because they use so much energy, there are environmental concerns about how energy efficient and polluting they are. This has been causing some governments to place stricter regulations on the industry. Rising energy costs are also becoming a problem for data centres. Almost half the power they consume is through operations.
What is left is used to cool the equipment. In this blog we go into the impact the energy crises is having on data centres in the UK. Power outages are also affecting data centres. According to a report by Aggreko, 65% of UK data centres have experienced power outages within the 18 months before July 2022. This causes problems as can be seen in July 2022, London.
The heatwave caused cooling-related power outages for Google and Oracle. One of the consequences was the network of Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital stopped working and staff no longer had access to patient’s medical notes. This caused a lot of disruption, including operation cancellations. We can answer your questions about IT infrastructure, network or servers. Please get in touch with us at PCR Connected.
