In my previous article, we have seen what is a data center and its functionality. Let us look into the topic on what are the types of data centers, features, and differentiation of each model.

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 center
• Managed hosting facility
• Colocation data center
• Cloud hosting data center

Let’s take a deep look into each data center types,

Enterprise data center (In-House Data Center or Corporate data centers)

An enterprise data center 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 is seen mainly for companies that prefer 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 hyper-scale data centers are not the most common form of a private facility.

The reality is that while the number of investment companies is making on their own, internal enterprise data centers are 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.

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. Managed hosting facility refers to an IT service model where a customer leases hardware — servers, storage, and network — from a managed service provider, like Rackspace. The hardware is dedicated to just that customer, hence the “single-tenant” moniker, giving the customer access to the full performance capabilities of the hardware. As a single tenant, customers have total control over their hardware, apps, operating systems and security. The “managed” part means the MSP handles the administration, management and support of the infrastructure, which is housed in a data center owned by the provider, as opposed to onsite at a customer’s location.

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 infrastructures.
• Since the infrastructure is managed by hosting providers, it’s not necessary that you need IT expertise to manage your infrastructure.

Colocation data center

 Colocation hosting data centers allow 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 infrastructures 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.

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 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, the customer provides all equipment and connectivity
• Co lo provides connectivity, the customer owns servers.
• Co lo owns the servers, the customer provides the application.
• A 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 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 a real-time environment. Hence there would be a lot of resources wasted without using that. It can be minimized by other models like a cloud data center.

Cloud hosting data center

 Cloud computing is on-demand, integrated, configured, ready to use a combination of computing, storage, network, platform, and application software. The data centers that are built for this purpose are falling under the category of cloud hosting data center. This is the emerging data center type that is adopted by enterprises and the rapid growth of Amazon Webservices, Microsoft Azure Webservices, Oracle OCI, etc are examples of this.

Even though this type is similar to managed hosting data centers, the possibilities of technology available under cloud computing are far better than any other type. 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 are 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.

Have a comment or points to be reviewed? Knowledge is power and it increases by sharing. Feel free to comment.