What is a Data center in web hosting?
A service that is used to provide a huge amount of electrical equipment that can be either computers or other communication equipment is known as a data center. It is an association that is solely maintained for the purpose of managing or organizing data that is essentially required to be used for daily operations. For example, the data center of a bank would store all detailed information of its customers. All companies have a data center of their own large scale companies may even multiple data centers. For the large cities, the data centers are provided with their own individual data location to prevent theft of data and to maintain security of the important data contained.

The organizations providing the data center service handle the data contained by them with utmost security as it is the lifeline of the company. Therefore the data center organization maintains high level or integrity and provides optimum functionality of the computer environment that it hosts for. This is usually shown by the general layout of the data center.

The data center can cover the area of a room to an entire building depending upon its size. Most of the data are stored in for of racks with corridors provided between them for easy access. The servers that are available vary from 1u servers to huge silos that occupy various tiles stacked upon the floor. Some of the mainframe computers and storage devices are often as big as the racks and are placed next to them.
The communications are mostly based on the ip protocol service in most data centers. They are equipped with routers and switches which comprise of the critical components that act as transporters of traffic to the outside world from the servers. Using two or more upstream service providers provide redundancy to the available internet connection.
Some of the datacenters run the basic internet and intranet services like email servers, proxy servers, DNS servers etc.

As mentioned earlier, the data that is available in the centers are treated with utmost security. Many network security elements are employed to keep the data safe. Such as firewalls, VpN gateway, Intrusion detection systems to detect malicious activities etc. are incorporated. Common monitoring systems and other such applications are also available. For added security for emergency situations such as failure of communication inside the data center, offsite monitoring systems are also provided.


 

 All Right Reserved Ank India 2008 - 2009