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10 Interesting Facts to Know About Data Centers

Data center is basically a center with loads of sensitive and modern computer equipments that basically manages all the data of an organization.

An organization can compromise with interior of their company but definitely not with quality of data servers and other equipments because these days it’s a necessary prerequisite as the best server/ computer equipments you have, the more customers you will have.

With almost every company going on cloud to cut down the resources and time they are spending earlier to maintain the data network outsourcing, the data work is the easiest thing to do where the core business of company isn’t affected. 

With so much demand of data centers, here are some interesting facts to know about data center:

1. There are around 5, 09,147 data centers in the world and the total area it acquires is 28,58,31,541 sq ft. nearly that is equivalent to 5,955 football fields.

2. In 2015, 1.2 trillion GB of data got created that is equivalent to 75 Billion 16GB iPods. Roughly every person on earth will have around 10 iPods.

3. The world’s biggest data center is based in Chicago, and is backed up by 53 generators. It utilizes 8.5 million gallons of cooling fluid per year. It is 1.1 million square fit in size and was converted to telecom used back in 1999.

4. The amount of internet online shopping per hour of whole world is equal to GDP of Bulgaria.

5. EPRI says - "For every watt of computer power consumed by a data center, it takes another watt to cool it". Which means around 5-10 MW of power just for cooling a data center.

6. Nowadays even Data centers are highly secured as all the data of banks, companies; govt. organizations are stored at one place. These days, data server companies automatically switch data from one center to another so that no one can know which data is available in which center.

7. Data centers are cooled with cooling fluids and Air conditioners that leaves around 17% carbon footprint.

8. Data center more than 7 years old are considered to be out of date as per green computing norms’ that’s why after every two years, equipment is upgraded to maintain the efficiency of data servers.

9.    Google has 12 data centers all over the planet, 6 of which are in North America. Recent estimations predict that Google has more than 900,000 servers in its data centers around the world in all.

10. Enough information is consumed on internet every hour that can stack up 7 billion DVDs that they had scaled Mt. Everest 95 times.

These days with the E-commerce market scaling up high and startup culture blooming in India, servers are one of the crucial factors which will keep you ahead of competitors.

About Us- RackBank® DataCenters is a Tier-3 Data Center in India located in Indore. Since our inception in 2013 by Mr. Narendra Sen, we have been providing best-in-class premium data center services including dedicated server hosting, managed and unmanaged services and colocation services in India. Our datacenter is spread across 35,000 sq ft of land and has a capacity of 2500+ servers and is especially favourable for start-ups due to its cost-effectiveness.

Internet of Things (IoT) - Its Growing Impact on Data Centers

We are living in times where Internet of Things is keeping us all wirelessly wired and so connected every moment. To name a few, IoT objects like smart devices, smart homes and wearables is what everyone is looking forward to. It is revolutionizing the way people do and understand things and business by greatly influencing the industries and the world at large in the most unimaginable ways.

As Internet of Things has made an evolutionary leap from ‘Internet of Things’ to getting its new name as ‘Internet of Everything’, it has come a long way and still continues to be one of the major driver in taking technology industry forward. So as we see IoT playing a big role, the massive amount of data bits will keep gushing through datacenter creating ample opportunities for data center industry to play even a bigger role.

What Underlying Opportunities & Challenges IoT is bringing for Data Centers?

As per a Gartner report, it was stated that,

“IoT will have 25 Billion connected Units by 2020 growing approximately 5 times of what it is now in 2015 i.e. 4.9 billion connected things”.

Also, a Forrester report says that, “More than 82 percent of businesses are going to be on IoT applications by 2017”.

Above two instances show us quite clearly how IoT and Data Center are poised to form a closer and stronger connect.

And with such surge, billions of data points are continuously forming due to these IoT objects which in return requires huge storage for storing, processing and analyzing them. Also, with more and more applications being based on Internet of Things that includes the booming "smart home" market accompanying predictive analytics, would accelerate data center demands.

So the data centers would play a crucial role in interconnecting all the active components, together with chillers, UPS systems, PDUs, cooling units, etc, where a data center admin would monitor and supervise their combined functioning.

Also, the new and existing data center vendors would have to include and build IoT-aware infrastructure and capacity management platforms in their services portfolio to avoid any upsetting of uptime, bandwidth or similar parameters.

Apart from this, huge chunks of data processing will go up in direct proportion to workloads creating bottlenecks for data center providers such as capacity, security and analytics. This would call for an efficient system management platform with multiplying growth in network connections, storage capacity, server expansions giving a fillip to distributed data center management approach.

The Road Ahead

To sum it up, Internet of Things is indubitably giving rise to a host of opportunities to data centers to move, store, process and analyze the data generated by IoT translating it into useful business insights.

Though, it would take handsome amount of time to execute it all as the most datacenters currently don’t have proper systems and infrastructure ready to make the most of the data being produced.  

Henceforth, the Data center hardware and software services market will have to calculatively and strategically handle such data upsurge that witnesses a breakneck growth of IoT industry now and in time to come.

What is a Tier-3 Data Center

Before we jump onto the description of Tier -3 data center, it is important to understand the hierarchy.Tier 1 to 4 data center is actually a standardized methodology used to define the uptime of a data center.

The Tier number designation to any data center is based on the evaluation of following parameters:

a) Data center performance
b) Investment
c) ROI (return on investment)

Tier 3 data centers are considered fairly robust and less prone to failures. Tier 3 is designed to host critical servers like dedicated server, vps servers with fully redundant subsystems (cooling, power, network links, storage etc. 

Quite obvious, the simplest is a Tier 1 data center used by small business or shops.

  Tier 1 = Non-redundant capacity components (single uplink and servers).
  Tier 2 = Tier 1 + Redundant capacity components.
  Tier 3 = Tier 1 + Tier 2 + Dual-powered equipment and multiple uplinks.
  Tier 4 = Tier 1 + Tier 2 + Tier 3 + all components are fully fault-tolerant including uplinks, storage, chillers, HVAC systems, servers etc. Everything is dual-powered.

Click to know Why to prefer Tier 3 Data center

Data Center Availability According To Tiers

The Tier levels also describe the standard availability of data from the hardware at a location as follows:

• Tier 1: Demonstrating 99.671% availability
• Tier 2: Demonstrating 99.741% availability
• Tier 3: Demonstrating 99.982% availability
• Tier 4: Demonstrating 99.995% availability

Data center bandwidth

It is important to note that one should not confuse bandwidth tiers with datacenter tiers: These are two different logics to categorize servers. To add, there is no certification body for bandwidth tiers.

§  A tier 1 bandwidth provider is a provider that doesn’t pay for bandwidth – it’s independent.

§  A tier 2 provider peers with some network capacity but pays for access to the rest.

§  A tier 3 provider purchases all access from a third party – it is reliant on peers for its capacity.

Though some of the terminologies must be kept in mind while you start planning to evaluate a data center to outsource some of your IT operations:

§  The numbering system is reversed, with 1 being the best – not the worst.

§  Tier 1 bandwidth providers are considered to be the fastest and most reliable. However, hosts often have multiple providers, so the issue is rarely clear cut.

§  Numbering is only assigned on a scale of 1 to 3, not 1 to 4.

Summary

A Tier III data center offers 99.98% availability and data centers in this configuration provide facility to manage maintenance periods without affecting the continuity of service on the servers.

How Outsourcing Data Center Operations Can Boost Your Business?

Many reports have often suggested that 99% of businesses fail in the first two quarters because of ill planning and lack of visibility. Surprisingly, businesses don’t fail when they have a dearth of work; businesses face a nose dive when they start growing! Yes, it’s the growth that companies are unable to manage and they lose their brand value before building a brand of their own. Can say, death via negative branding!

Now if we look deeper into the cause – effect equation, this failure happens because most the companies, during the inception mode, try to do everything on their own (both core and non-core operations). As they scale up, they are unable to manage the non-core, time consuming elements stunting seamless business service. These issues of not prioritizing operational elements take the growing organizations from sunlight to darkest ally of spiral failures. 

One of the elements (unless it is the core operations of an organization) that takes up a lot of time for any growing organization is managing the data and data related services. Every business today leverages IT in one way or the other. IT is no more an enabler but a close partner for every business. Today, a CTO sits next to CEO when it comes to formulating innovative strategies. 

According to a recent survey of Fortune 500 companies by Forbes, most IT leaders evaluate and implement the option of outsourced data centers over in-house operation.

So what are top 5 reasons companies choose to outsource their operations to datacenter and at times, dedicated server hosting:

Reason 1: Guaranteed Uptime, every time!

It is important to note that outsourced datacenter services come with a sheer responsibility of services providers. The services are governed by service level agreements (SLAs) that held service providers answerable for all the environmental and infrastructure elements. The SLAs include unsaid commitments to state-of-the-art building systems and designs, maintained at the industry best standards level to reduce downtime and subsequent financial penalties.

According to Gartner, the average recovery time for total data center outage is 134 minutes which no startup business running its own datacenter can commit. Outsourcing thus becomes the best option.

Reason 2 –Low on CapEx, Boosts Branding!

Data center outsourcing has been a prominent choice of startup and growing businesses as it gives leverage of moving the high CapEx requirement to low OpEx. This indeed comes with flexibility to expand the need at any hour of the day/ night ensuring consistent business value delivery.

CapEX to OpEX, agreed! How it effects branding? Rather how it boosts branding?

With adoption of world class data center services, in fact dedicated hosting; your clients are assured of your sound decision making. This doesn’t end here as you may also attract investor confidence and higher motivation of employees in your growth plans. A well thought-out service level agreement and outsourcing partnership, one can assure long-term solid foundation for futuristic growth plans for the business.

Reason 3 - Creating Distances for Risk Mitigation

Data center helps companies to mitigate by ensuring adequate distance between a company’s headquarters and its production data center. Uncertain business disruptive events such as utility blackout or the occurrence of a natural disaster can be mitigated in comparatively small turnaround time. It is though important to take into account the latency in response for applications in the data center and between. No wonder we are seeing smaller and robust data center hubs and colocation facilities in key markets catering high quality inventory to mitigate risks.

Reason 4 - Increased Focus, core business!

Building a new datacenter or upgrading an existing is not an easy task and can take anywhere up to 2 years or more. The business agility definitely gets impact as a critical amount of resources is being spent to build up a data center/ dedicated hosting. This doesn’t end here and despite building a state-of-art data center, business heads may end up scratching heads to deal with under-utilization of capacities of in-house datacenters. When it comes to an outsourced data center model, the troubles of upgrading IT infrastructure and building systems are shifted to the outsourced data service provider. Enabling the CIOs and IT managers focus more on important activities contributing to business goals.

Reason 5 - Regulatory Compliance and Audits, all managed!

With industry standards upgrading very often, there has been a constant increase in technical and regulatory pressures impacting business infrastructure in most organizations. Outsourced data center model ensures compliance and audit capabilities to meet the SSAE16 standards, the health insurance portability and accountability act (HIPAA) and many other government regulations. It is very difficult for a growing company to invest and maintain these standards (where it would need to employ dedicated staff for regulatory control management).

So, where are we heading?

As per Gartner report published early this year, the data center outsourcing market in India is growing at a rate of 25-30%. With this, the third party data center is expected to grow at a rate of 80% in the coming years.  Innovative business ideas may want to take utmost advantage of dynamic market environment. In such scenarios, improved connectivity and latency are two key elements for growth. Datacenters are an answer to this growing need!