Data Center
A data center is a facility used for housing a large amount of electronic equipment, typically computers and communications equipment. As the name implies, a data center is usually maintained by an organization for the purpose of handling the data necessary for its operations. A bank for example may have a data center, where all its customers' account information is maintained and transactions involving this data are carried out. Practically every company that is mid-sized or larger has some kind of data center with the larger companies often having dozens of data centers. Most large cities have many purpose-built data center buildings in secure locations close to telecommunications services. Most colocation centers and Internet peering points are located in these kinds of facilities.
As data is a crucial aspect of most organizational operations, organizations tend to be very protective of their data and data centers. A data center must therefore keep high standards for assuring the integrity and functionality of its hosted computer environment. This is depicted in a data center's physical and logical layout.
Before the dot com crash, millions of square meters of general-purpose data centers were built in the hope of filling them with servers for web hosting and application service providers. However this demand never came true.
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