In recent times, businesses must be able to collect and process a vast amount of information in an accelerated time frame to stay competitive. Understanding data center architecture and determining how to configure your IT department data center can reduce costs and improve the efficiency in which your business operates.
This business guide will focus on defining data centers and data center architectures and the common strategies in investing in data center equipment and services for IT departments.
What are Data Centers?
Data centers are locations that contain computer hardware and supporting equipment. These locations can be an on-premise building or room, a rented data center in another location, virtualized data centers and/or cloud data centers. The computer hardware and supporting equipment, when specifically configured together, provide an integral function to your business needs.
The data center collects and processes information through the different functions of the computer hardware:
- Central Processing Units (CPUs)
- Storage
- Communications
- Software
For the computer hardware to provide these functions at optimum efficiency, with minimum downtime and reduced costs, supporting equipment such as cooling equipment, backup power supplies and network panels are installed according to the computer hardware needs. These form the data center architecture, which makes up the data center for your IT department.
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Investing in Data Center Equipment and Services for IT Departments
The most common strategy that businesses consider when investing in data center equipment and services is to focus on how they will help a business operate at its utmost efficiency, with minimal downtime, and with reduced costs. It is possible to invest in data center equipment and services that can accomplish all three of those objectives.
Equipment to increase business operation efficiency:
- Installation and upgrades to computing hardware systems such as mainframes, servers, hard drives and databases
- High-speed network connectivity and adequate bandwidth
- Logical data routing that establishes connectivity between the equipment in the data center and other business systems
Equipment and Services to Minimize Downtime
In events of natural disasters, storms, power outages or malware invasion, equipment and services will help get businesses up and running sooner rather than later. For this to happen, some equipment and services are needed. This includes:
- Extra servers outside of the main server location for redundancy and backups
- Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) and backup energy sources
- Temperature and humidity control equipment
- On-site or on-call engineers available for malfunctions or maintenance
- Physical and network security services
Related: Predictive maintenance: Avoid Downtime with AI
Selecting Locations to Reduce Costs
Selecting where the data center architecture will exist can have an impact on the cost of having a data center. For example, having an on-premise data center can take a toll on overall capital expense (CAPEX) spending. However, reducing costs may take top priority over any benefits an on-premise data center can provide. Selecting an alternative location for the data center can help with that:
- Rented data center facilities reduce CAPEX costs
- Virtualized data centers reduce costs on hardware and energy consumption
- Cloud data centers can shift expenses from capital to operating expenses, which can be deducted from taxes
Now that you are more knowledgeable about data centers and the significant role they play in an IT department’s daily responsibility in a business, you can make more informed choices. Investing in a specifically configured data center for your business will collect and process information faster for optimum business operation efficiency. Also, competitiveness is managed effortlessly with minimal downtime and reduced costs.
