ITMD 526-Week 5-Blog

This blog discusses in brief about the various types of data centers that exists around the world. The types are described as per the operating facilities offered by the data centers.

Colocation Centers: (Colos)

Data centers that are available for rental to customers with amenities such as space, equipment, power, cooling, physical security, servers, storage and network equipment are known as colocation data centers. Colocation centers range from 50,000 to 100,000 square feet in size generally. Although small size companies to fortune 500 companies use colos, they are popular with midsize IT companies. The colo providers undertake the maintenance of facility and internal systems and customers maintain control over the hardware. Century Link, Equinix and Hurricane Electric are few of the major colocation data center providers.

In-house Data Centers

Many large scale industries design, build, manage their own data centers. In-house data centers are those that are built and maintained by the companies that use them. The facilities and competences of an in-house data center depends on the company that is willing to build it. Companies that generally operate highly secure and large amount of data opt for this type of data center.

Wholesale & Retail data centers

A wholesale data center is comparatively larger than a colocation center where the provider leases fully provisioned large blocks of space and power dedicated to single or limited customers. A wholesale data center saves time and money for the customers since the data center is fully equipped. These data centers have enough space to draw at least 300KW of power. Equinix, CenturyLink-Savvis and SunGard are few of the major wholesale data center providers.

Retail data centers on the other hand provide service to large number of companies concurrently. Companies take special care of physical security since numerous companies will be using a colocation center.

Dedicated Hosting

This type of data center is used completely by a single customer. The provider provides the space for server capacity with no additional services. The customer is responsible for full maintenance of the servers.

 Managed Hosting

The provider provides server space capacity, operates and maintains the data center on behalf of the customer. Some common services include database administration, operating system administration, managed security services, managed storage, application management services, disaster recovery, systems monitoring and remote management.