Data Centre: Uses, Benefits, Electrical, and Thermal Needs

This report provides a comprehensive overview of data centres, detailing their uses, benefits, and the crucial electrical and thermal requirements for their operation. Data centres serve as essential hubs for storing and processing digital information, utilizing infrastructure such as iSCSI arrays, NAS, and Fibre Channel SAN arrays, and employing wavelength division multiplexing for long-haul transport networks. The report highlights the inherent security and reliability advantages of data centres, including protection against threats like DDoS attacks and data theft through techniques such as Trusted Virtual Data Centres (TVDc). It also emphasizes the importance of maintaining optimal humidity and temperature conditions for IT equipment and servers, as well as strategies for increasing efficiency by reducing power consumption, particularly in ventilation and cooling systems. Furthermore, the report discusses the role of data centres in keeping pace with IT evolution and managing and organizing data for specified objectives.

Data Centres Uses and benefits
Electrical and thermal needs of information technology are housing by data centres in
addition to the storages devices, servers, and all the IT equipment (Shehabi et al. 2018).The
innovation of the information technology in the world made it apparent that the using and
processing of the data become faster, easier and with ingrained security and rigor. Nowadays,
mostly all companies are using some types of data centre which gives the advantage of modern
and durable technology sector (Shehabi et al. 2018).
Storing and transmitting Digital information:
The main reason of using IT infrastructure in Data centres is to store and process digital
information. Majority of Data Centres rely on iSCSI arrays, NAS and Fibre Channel SAN arrays
to meet storage needs of the network(Mirzoev and Yang 2014).These data centres are connected
via long-haul transport networks using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). Since these
long-haul fibres are expensive and scarce, networks must provide spectral efficiency to
maximize the utilization.
Inherent security and reliability:
Data centre gives the advantage of securing all digital information and reliable services by
adopting the Trusted Virtual Data Centres protection can be gained from different threats like
denial of service (DDoS) and data theft. Security can be further increased by allowing controlled
access to network storage with the use of security labels to help in enforcing integrity checks and
isolation constraints. These security labels perform the function of memberships for the TVDc.
Furthermore, to ensure reliability of the various IT equipment and servers in these data centres, it
is important that proper humidity conditions and temperatures are maintained. It is also
important to identify the threats to data centre downtime and take necessary steps to maximize
the availability.

Increasing the Efficiency:
Ventilation and cooling systems typically account for 40% of total energy consumption. Thus to
save on power costs, power consumption of cooling systems need to be reduced by focussing
more on cooling efficiency than on effectiveness. Placing the workloads of different customers
on the same physical machine often leads to security vulnerabilities like theft of sensitive
information and DDoS attacks. TVDc or Trusted Virtual Data Centre is one technology which
has been developed to meet the need for strong integrity and isolation requirements of a cloud
computing environment.
Keep pace with IT Evolution:
The physical data centre network forms the core of big data which promotes explosive growth
for related software as also the underlying infrastructures(Chen et al. 2014). More than storing
data, data centres are responsible for managing and organizing data based on a specified
objective and development path.
References:
Chen, M. et al. 2014. Big data: A survey. Mobile Networks and Applications 19(2), pp. 171–209.
doi: 10.1007/s11036-013-0489-0.
Mirzoev, T. and Yang, B. 2014. Securing Virtualized Datacenters. International Journal of
Engineering Research & Innovation 2(1), pp. 23–29.
Shehabi, A. et al. 2018. Data center growth in the United States: Decoupling the demand for
services from electricity use. Environmental Research Letters 13(12). doi:
10.1088/1748-9326/aaec9c.