Data center, short for Internet Data Center (IDC, which is commonly known as Internet Data Center).
According to relevant statistics, in 2024, data traffic processed by data centers accounted for 99.35% of the total global traffic. In other words, almost all internet data relies on data center processing, which demonstrates its importance.
In current popular parlance, data centers are important infrastructure like water plants and power plants.
I. The Development History of Data Centers
Phase 1 of the data center
In the 1960s, humanity was still in the mainframe era. At that time, in order to house computer systems, storage systems, and power equipment, people built computer rooms, which were called “server farms”.
This “server farm” is considered the earliest prototype of a data center.
Phase II of the Data Center
virtual machine software called “Virtual PC”.Later, VMware launched the now-famous VMware Workstation, marking the arrival of the virtual machine era and laying the foundation for the evolution of data centers.
As time went on, the hosting services of the first generation of data centers began to become more refined, extending from complete server hosting to website hosting and virtual hosting services.
In other words, on a single server, virtual hosting software is used to create N virtual web hosting instances, which are then rented out to N customers. This is the second stage of an IDC (Internet Data Center).
Phase 3 of data centers
Then, in the early 21st century, companies like Amazon and Google proposed cloud computing , which brought data centers into the third stage (the cloud computing stage), which continues to this day.
The cloud computing stage represents the second phase of upgrade and evolution. Through virtualization and container technologies, it completely pools the computing resources of data center servers. All resources, such as CPU, memory, and hard drives, are managed by more powerful virtualization software and then allocated to users.
From renting physical hardware, it has evolved into renting virtual hardware, and even renting software platforms and services. IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS have thus emerged before us.
II. Composition and Structure of Data Centers
Next, let’s take a look at what components a data center actually consists of.
server equipment
The most basic equipment in a data center is, of course, the server. A server is essentially a high-performance computer, which most people have probably seen. It contains components similar to a desktop computer, such as a CPU, memory, motherboard, hard drive, graphics card (GPU), and power supply.
Previously, servers were primarily based on Intel architecture (and even earlier, PowerPC, SPARC, etc.). Now, with changes in national policy, domestically produced CPUs are rising in popularity and gaining an increasing market share. These domestically produced CPUs use the ARM architecture , offering better performance at a lower cost.