What is a Data Center?
A Data Center is a physical location that houses computing and networking components like servers, routers, switches and firewalls, as well as supporting facilities like backup equipment, fire suppression facilities and air conditioning. A data center may be a building or complex of dedicated building or simply a room that houses a few servers. Also, a data center may be private or shared.
As data centers evolved to be critical computing hubs that connect to other networks and the Internet, a great deal of industry focus centered on operational requirements as networked facilities. As a result, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) in cooperation with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) published the ANSI/TIA-942 Telecommunications Infrastructure Standard for Data Centers, which defined four levels of data center requirements that specify power, air conditioning and network component redundancy to ensure maximum data center availability.