Data centers are physical or virtual infrastructure used by enterprises to house computer, server and networking systems and components for the company’s information technology (IT) needs, which typically involve storing, processing and serving large amounts of mission-critical data to clients in a client/server architecture.
A data center, or datacenter, often requires extensive redundant or backup power supply systems, cooling systems, redundant networking connections and policy-based security systems for running the enterprise’s core applications.
Data center management involves ensuring the reliability of both the connections to the data center as well as the mission-critical information contained within the data center’s storage. It also entails efficiently placing application workloads on the most cost-effective compute resource available.
The Rise of the Software-Defined Data Center
While data centers are traditionally thought of as large-scale physical environments where an extensive number of computers and servers are housed, the software-defined data center (SDDC) has created a new breed of virtualized data centers and cloud-based data centers that extend a company s on-premises infrastructure to off-premises sites.
These virtual data centers can serve as a bridge to the enterprise’s private data center in a hybrid, or blended, fashion, or the company can completely offload its data center operations by relying on a public data center from a third-party service provider.
