Overview – An Elevator Pitch

This article is an overview. Please let me know if you would like to see more in-depth. Thanks!

A data center is a collection of computers housed in a building that is managed by people.

Why is it needed?

Data centers are the heart of the internet and the cloud. These physical infrastructures are a must to support the large scale web applications such as Facebook, Instagram, Google search engine, and lesser-known enterprise business application that process your Amazon orders and many business-to-business transactions.

What is it?

I am going to segment this complex system into 3 buckets, equipment, building, and people.

The Equipment:

The equipment in the data center can be further broken down to this sub-groups;

• Servers
• Networking equipment
• Storage
• Electrical power system
• Cooling system

First three in the list, servers, networking, and storage, are most often considered IT equipment and electrical and cooling systems are facility equipment. As such, the staff involved are also separated into respective groups.

Building:

Data centers come in many forms. From a purposely built, to restored strip malls to a room in an office building. A data center can have multiple rooms knows as “data hall.” Similarly, the term data center is also used interchangeably as data hall when in general office building.

People:

Data center professionals are a subset of the IT profession. These are the people behind the scenes that work in shifts to keep the data center running 24 x 7 x 365. There are many different structures in how staffs are organized but many are in either the IT group or Facility group.

IT group take care of the IT equipment, and they have further specialized skills in computer/servers, networking, and storage. IT staff can also include desktop support, but they are frequently separated from data center team.

The facility group takes care of the electrical and cooling system for the building. Unlike the IT team, the facility teams are usually not separated to serve the data center verse the rest of the building.

How does it work? …. this will be a separate article, potentially very long one.

This blog is a very high-level overview. Should I go more in-depth? Please let me know.