Data Centers: What Happens at These Facilities

Maybe you’ve heard the expression “Big Data” before. It’s an entire industry now. Mostly, the term means companies or entities that collect and harvest data for various purposes. 

That might sound ominous, but in most cases, it’s far more mundane than you may imagine. Usually, when a company tries to collect your data, it’s doing it for marketing purposes. If a company from which you buy things collects your data and sells it to a much larger company that processes it, this can inform and dictate marketing strategies that huge multinational conglomerates use when selling their products and services.

However, you may also hear about data centers, another aspect of this burgeoning industry. Data centers require robust security measures, which again might lead you to believe that there’s something nefarious happening inside. The truth will seem much more innocuous by comparison, but what happens in data centers should still hold your interest. We’ll talk about it in detail right now. 

What Does the Term “Data Center” Mean?

Before we talk about what happens in data centers, let’s first define the term. When someone talks about a data center, it’s not some nebulous concept that exists only in the digital world. The average data center simply looks like any other regular building, though you will doubtless see a security presence there, as we indicated. You might see guards, a fence around the building, keycard access, etc.

Usually, a data center acts as a repository for a particular company or business entity. There, the company stores its data. 

The composition of that data will probably vary dramatically from one company to another. Sometimes, a data center might have proprietary information, hence all the security. At other times, the data contained therein might consist of nothing but buyer information, such as names, addresses, and perhaps credit card numbers as well if each person bought sometimes from this company in the past. 

What Else Will You Find Inside Such a Building?

If you go into a data center, you will probably see application delivery controllers, servers, and network equipment like cabling, firewalls, switches, and routers. You might see data storage drives as well. 

If you own a desktop computer, you will get some of this equipment with that purchase, but in miniature. Since your computer only stores the files for your documents, pictures, video games you play, and things of that nature, you don’t need the much larger equipment you will see humming away if you enter a physical data center. 

What Happens in One of These Buildings?

As for what happens in a data center, it would probably bore you if you spent longer than a few minutes inside. The workers there maintain and guard the equipment we just mentioned. They do physical upgrades on it when that’s necessary. 

Keep in mind that all of the equipment you’d see if you walked into one of these facilities must support the activities and applications central to the business model of the company that created and funded the facility. That means you might have equipment dedicated to bespoke artificial intelligence tools, machine learning, and big data in a general sense. You might also have equipment dedicated to the online gaming communities that are so wildly popular in many parts of the world. 

Some equipment might direct and facilitate high-volume eCommerce transactions, like those that take place on sites like Etsy, Amazon, eBay, and others. The larger the company, the bigger the data center or centers that support it. 

You might have equipment that’s there for the facilitation of productivity applications like email. If you have a huge email community like Gmail, you can imagine how much data such a facility would hold and process. 

More than anything else, though, you’ll see data recovery, backup, management, and storage happening in a data center. Often, you can actually hear these huge machines humming slightly if you stand near them. 

They’re not alive in the conventional sense, yet they have a kind of artificial life. They’re processing untold amounts of information every second of the day, assuming they continue running correctly and nothing disrupts them. 

If you’re someone who appreciates technology, all this may sound fascinating. A trip to a data center might sound like a day checking out the rides at Disneyland. Most people would not find their time spent in such a facility very interesting, though. For the most part, they’re full of huge machines quietly conducting their business.