A data center is a physical facility that organizations use to house their critical applications and data

As technology improves and innovations take the world to the next stage, the importance of data centers also grows. In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT), ever-escalating data requirements, and ongoing fastened cloud adoption due to remote working have contributed to a shift away from traditional enterprise data center facilities. Modernisation of data centers takes place along with tech growth.

A data center is a physical facility that organisations use to house their critical applications and data. A data center's design is based on a network of computing and storage resources that enable the delivery of shared applications and data. The key components of a data center design include routers, switches, firewalls, storage systems, servers and application-delivery controller.

Many organizations are currently switching to the modern ways of data centers, all of which leverage numerous benefits, but at the same time, create critical challenges. Two decades ago, when data centers became a hot topic for the internet users, there was a debate over complex instruction set computer (CISC) and reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architectures, and between large symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) servers and mainframes and small systems. All this happened before the emergence of co-processors, AISCs and other fancy accelerators to speed data access and optimize complex operations. Now, data centers are mostly aligned over x86 CPUs, small two-socket servers and a general standardization of the components that make up the modern data center. However, companies are still looking for ways to increase their efficiency at a lower cost based on technology advancements.

The Evolution of Data Center

Even though when today's data centers are sophisticated and hold a lot of technological components, the beginning of the evolution was simple. Like all other technology improvements, data centers too have been through the long path of transformation.

Pre-1990s: Data centers were formed using large rooms of computers, where computer bugs indicated 'live' bugs inside these large systems.

1990-2000: As internet and client-server computing started taking center stage, data centers became more reputed and drastic for growing businesses. People started relying on huge datasets that led to the growth of data center companies.

2000-2007: As the 21st century began, technology was reaching unprecedented heights. Major improvements like data center services, data center outsourcing demands, sharing hosting, coupled with application hosting and managed services, ISPs, ASP's, MSP's, etc came to light. People became more aware of data centers. In 2005, modular, portable data center design concepts came to market.

2008-2011: During this period, data centers became more stabilized to society. Henceforth, the focus shifted to power efficiency, cooling technologies, and management facilities of the data center. The modern society gave a lot of choices while planning to set up the data storage system.

The limits of ordinary data centers

Today, Intel CPUs are considered very powerful. They can boast up to 112 cores and an incredible number of instructions and features to manage every type of workload. The latest Intel CPU featured with aplomb can handle technical machine learning activities. However, the entire industry is trying to find a solution for its catch.

The x86-based server design offers a balanced approach that works well for most applications. However, they aren't designed for the specialized workloads that are emerging. Big data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and other high-end technologies are changing the focus of data centers. In some organizations, these disruptive technologies are more important to handle than the applications that x86-based servers were designed to address.

CPUs and GPUs and Accelerators

The modern technology is all about minimizing the cost. However, when we take cost, efficiency, power and optimization in a modern data center, x86 architectures don't work anymore. ARM CPUs are less powerful on a single core basis than its counterpart, x86. But it consumes friction of the energy and can be more densely packed in the same rack space. ARM is more attractive when considering that most modern applications are highly parallelized and organized as microservices.

GPUs are being deployed for specialized tasks suppressing the single-core CPU performance. GPU-enabled platforms have prompted a rebalancing of system designs, addressing the uniquely data-hungry nature of these processors.

In a nutshell

Cloud providers are switching to independent data centers in recent years, large enterprises are following the suit. Henceforth, the evolution of data centers is expected to take a new turn since the pandemic pushed people to work on the cloud more than ever before.