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What are Data Centers?
Have you ever heard about servers that store all your online data? Chances are that you have. If you are a frequent user of the internet or any web platform. You mostly sign in with your credentials and view your personal data and update, delete or share it. Well, all of this data has to be stored somewhere. The data you upload online, be it any kind of data; text, pictures, videos or audio files, it has to be stored somewhere on a physical storage unit, like a hard drive.
There are computers built specially to store all of this massive data that keeps coming in from various locations on earth. These computers are called servers, A server is typically a computer system that has more processing power than your average personal computer. Servers are mostly hybrid containing more than one processing machines and have large storage capacities. You can usually see these kinds of machines connected with many ethernet wires. They can process and transfer data with rapid speed, and a bunch of servers can be seen placed in any large organization to handle internal data.
For big companies like Facebook and Google, the number of users is in billions. So it only makes sense for them to have as many servers as they can possibly have because the number of users is also always increasing. These companies have separate locations for all the servers they need, and they call these locations “Data Centers”. A Data Center has many rows of servers that are always working and processing data. Data Centers also have a cooling mechanism because a lot of heat is produced by so many machines at one place. Since the data from all around the globe is being processed through these data centers, there comes some latency to data distribution if the data center is far from your current location. To overcome this latency, data centers are spread all across the world. And mostly each continent has at least one data center for such large organizations.
How much is too much data centers?
Data centers are never enough, there is currently no such thing as too many data centers. Since online data is ever-growing many companies have also provided their users with unlimited online data storage capacity. This means the number of datacenters also need to be ever-increasing.
Currently, data is the most valuable asset in the world. Many advertising agencies pay top dollar for the data of users so that they can research their search trends, likes/dislikes and then show them the advertisements for what they might really want to buy. Data is being purchased by advertisement companies, research groups, and other organizations so it is very important for large companies with a large number of users to be able to fulfill this need for data for which they keep increasing their data center. Apart from this speed and latency is also a major factor for increasing demand in data centers, since more closeby data centers provide each individual country better speed at which data is delivered to that country.
What is the future of data centers like?
Future of data centers is either very clustered or very clean. These are the two top assumptions when it comes to data centers.
Clustered in a sense that more and more data centers will keep emerging until everyone will have a data center in their neighborhood. An example of this phenomenon was seen in the rapid rise of bitcoin prices when anyone with a good enough computer thought about mining bitCoin and other cryptocurrencies. Mining cryptocurrency is essentially selling your processing power to cryptocurrency organizations which makes your PC a small server for that organization, obviously, we can go into more details about crypto mining but that’s the essential idea. So, many people thought about opening up their own data centers for mining cryptocurrencies and they are called mining farms. People actually earn a lot from these mining farms. And only after the rise of cryptocurrency people were made aware of the benefits of having such mining farms or small data centers.
The cleaner version of data centers in the future totally depends on technological advancement. The more technology grows cleaner way to handle a lot of data. Just recently big companies have thought about utilizing satellites to make internet available in remote areas of the world. Once there are satellites to provide internet to the public then it will make more sense to have data centers within these satellites. “StarLink” is a very real project by visionary billionaire Elon Musk that focuses on providing affordable internet around the world through satellites and few satellites are already released in the orbit for this project. Apart from satellites, another cleaner approach that decreases the cluster of data centers is more of a joint approach. Instead of every major company having their own data centers around the world, most of them can come together for a more collaborative approach, meaning other companies can also utilize their data centers. This idea is even more far fetched than the satellites. Because such large companies don’t really opt-in for a collaborative approach.
Companies like Amazon, Azure and Google offers web services mainly hosting through their data centers. They charge you some amount for using their hosting services and you can manually or automatically change the data center that is running your web applications. Mostly customers keep switching data centers as per their demand and users. Most beginners in cloud computing can become experts within a very short amount of time by following the documentation provided by these companies for their cloud services. Although having some cloud computing training will do these beginners wonders in the coming years because the future of cloud computing is also growing just like the number of data centers around the world. But even with one CCIE data center certification, such people can gain enough knowledge to change the game. Also, getting this certification is not that difiicult if you have taken CCIE Data Center training before appearing in the exam.
And in the case of data centers and their ever-growing demand, a major change is required. Because the current growth structure is very flat and might become obsolete in the coming years.
