Understanding the Different Types of Data Center, What are the types of data center, What is Enterprise data centre, what is Managed hosting data center, what is Colocation data centre, what is Cloud hosting data centre

1. What are the types of data center
Not all data centers are created equal. Today’s facilities come in all shapes and sizes
based on the requirement of each organization. Hence based these requirements we
can categorize these data centers as four which is listed as below,
• Enterprise data centre
• Managed hosting facility
• Colocation data centre
• Cloud hosting data centre
Let’s take a deep look into each data centre types,
Enterprise data centre(In-House Data Center or Corporate data centers)
An enterprise data centre is owned and operated by the same company, and is
sometimes located within the same facility as the main company premises, but it
may be located on offsite also based on company IT policies. Quite simply, an
enterprise data center is a private facility operated for the sole use of supporting a
single organization.
This is the model that are seen mainly for companies that prefers to have their data
to be saved within their facilities. The key quality of an enterprise data center, is the
fact that it is custom-built to fit the needs of a single organization and the most
trusted way for companies since they manage everything as their own. Although
building and equipping these facilities requires significant capital investment and
requires ongoing expenses to maintain, they are well-suited for companies with
unique network needs or those that do enough business to take advantage of
economies of scale. Tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Facebook make extensive
use of enterprise data centers, but their massive hyperscale data centers are not the
most common form of private facility.
The reality is that while the amount of investment companies are making in their
own, internal enterprise data centers is either flat or shrinking, no-one really knows
whether that on-premise infrastructure model will go away completely since the
growth of Cloud data center facilities. It’s undeniable that the total portion of the
enterprise IT budget that goes to the corporate data center is shrinking. Whether it
will eventually reach ‘zero,’ however, remains a huge unknown.

2. Managed hosting facility data center
With managed hosting, you don’t actually own the server, you are utilizing the data
center resources based on your requirements. In a managed hosting data centre,
this is a facility which is managed on behalf of a business and will usually be located
within a separate premises to the main business which it is supporting. In fact this
facility can be defined as “outsourcing” data center. Your web hosting provider will
be the one responsible to maintain the server including its integrity, reliability and
performance. Because your hosting provider is responsible for administering your
server, you will need to pay extra for this service. Managed hosting is very
convenient as you or your staff are not required to manage your server.
Managed hosting is a good choice for companies that have limited technological
experience or expertise and would like someone else to handle tasks that require
this knowledge for them. It is also a good choice for a company that doesn’t want to
have the initial capital expense of purchasing their own server.
Things to be noted,
§ Managed hosting will cost you monthly leasing fees so the price is spread out
over a longer period of time.
§ In managed hosting the server is owned by your hosting provider- Hence you
don’t have administrative headaches of managing any of the physical
infrastructure.
§ Since the infrastructure is managed by hosting provider, it’s not necessary that
you need an IT expertise to manage your infrastructure.
Colocation data centre
Colocation hosting data centers allows your business to keep your servers on the
host’s premises and share their bandwidths, space, cooling and power. In simple, in a
large data center(host) where we will lease some of the physical infrastructure to
support your IT infrastructure. The concept is similar to leasing a warehouse or office
space in which the landlord provides facility maintenance to the tenant.

3. With colocation hosting your company purchases its own server, sets it up, and then
physically takes it to the data center to house your server. You will have the full
control over all your assets as this is completely owned by you. You should have
enough IT resources to set up and maintain these resources throughout.
There are multiple levels of service which you can opt and some of the examples as
below,
Co lo hosts, customer provides all equipment and connectivity
Co lo provides connectivity, customer owns servers.
Co lo owns the servers, customer provides the application.
Customer just buys a service.
Things to be noted,
§ With colocation hosting you own your servers. You will have complete power
over your equipment that are being used by you.
§ You can build the IT infrastructure as your own options and models. This is
customizable either physically or logically.
§ Your startup costs will be higher with colocation hosting because you will need
to purchase your own server/network devices.
§ You must have an IT expertise for managing your data center physically and
logically.
§ Resources may be wasted- Do you know in many organizations, they don’t
even use the actual capacity of a server in real time environment. Hence there
would be lot of resources wasted without using that. It can be minimized by
other models like cloud data center.
Cloud hosting data centre
Cloud computing is on demand, integrated, configured, ready to use combination of
compute, storage, network, platform and application software. The data centers that
are built for this purpose is falling under the category of cloud hosting data center.
This is the emerging data center type that is adapted by enterprises and the rapid
growth of Amazon Webservices, Microsoft Azure Webservices, Oracle OCI etc are the
examples of this.

4. Even though this type is similar to managed hosting data centers, the possibilities of
technology available under cloud computing is far better than any other types. In a
cloud hosting facility, customers and cloud providers are also having almost similar
administration rights to their resources(customers do not have any physical view and
physical rights to their resources). When you are approaching a cloud computing
provider, they will give you all the IT infrastructures as per your needs but you will
never have the exact idea of infrastructure background that supports it. It’s the
complete responsibility of your cloud hosting provider.
There are three main elements of this service: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform
as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). These three combined
encompass software, network capacity, and the equipment used to support
operations such as storage, hardware, servers, and networking components.
Things to be noted,
Apart from the benefits of Managed hosting data centers, cloud hosting will have
below benefits too.
§ One of the top benefits provided by Cloud Hosting providers is stability. Since
the operations of your infrastructure do not depend on a particular server,
there is practically no downtime. If there were a failure or overload on any
server, the backup server would kick-in until the issue was resolved.
§ Cloud Hosting also brings incredible speeds and performance.
§ Cost-effective - because you only pay for services that is used by you. Hence
there is no resource wastage to be reported.
§ Scalable - because bandwidth and hardware can be adjusted to align with use
or needs.

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