Also known as: Datacenter, Server farm
A data center is a purpose-built facility that houses computing, storage, and networking equipment together with the power, cooling, and connectivity needed to keep it running reliably around the clock.1
Overview
At its core a data center is a building full of rack servers and the supporting systems that keep them alive: redundant utility feeds and backup generators, uninterruptible power supplies, air or liquid cooling, fire suppression, and high-capacity network links to the outside world. Facilities are graded by uptime tiers (Tier I–IV) and by energy efficiency, often reported as PUE (power usage effectiveness — total facility power divided by IT power). Scale ranges from a single room to hyperscale campuses run by cloud providers.
Where it fits
A data center is where most servers actually live. You can put your own hardware in one through colocation, rent capacity inside one as cloud computing, or rely on one indirectly every time you use a web service. The facility’s redundancy is the foundation of high availability. In GopherTrunk terms a data center is fine for storing and serving decoded calls, but the RF capture still happens at the antenna — the radio front end cannot move into the building.
Sources
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Data center — Wikipedia, on data center facilities, tiers, and infrastructure. ↩