| That is centres are now designed to be able to | | | | companies whose business is centred on commerce |
| evolve in order to accommodate growth as well as | | | | conducted mainly on the Internet will also build their |
| changes security needs and possible consolidation. | | | | own particular brand of IDC's. |
| There has been little change in the basic design of | | | | The structure of IDC's for these so called |
| layer 2 and layer 3 data bases for several years | | | | "enterprise" companies although similar to those built |
| most of the improvements relate to increased | | | | by service providers will usually have less ability to be |
| demand for quality in terms of availability and the | | | | altered in such areas as scalability. |
| highest possible uptime. There have been | | | | Corporate data centres are built to suit the |
| considerable changes in the basic technology as well | | | | requirements of individual companies' business models. |
| as some of the protocol requirements which have | | | | They may offer differing types of functions for |
| challenged engineers in their efforts to produce data | | | | different business requirements including intranet |
| centres that can live up to modern design | | | | services, and, or, internet services. |
| requirements. | | | | Corporate data centres may be connected to any |
| It is now considered essential that data centres are | | | | kind of server farm as well as securing a connection |
| highly flexible in that they are capable supporting any | | | | to the remainder of an enterprise network or |
| new services without drastic changes to its basic | | | | possibly private WAN or Internet edge. As well as a |
| infrastructure. | | | | range of other, possible options depending on |
| They must also be highly scalable meaning that they | | | | requirements of the companies business needs. |
| are capable of adapting effortlessly to growth | | | | More recently more specific enterprise data centres |
| without causing any disruption to the end user. There | | | | have come online bowing to new needs for |
| also needs to be a high level of availability this means | | | | application environments these include concepts such |
| that the data centre should be capable of maintaining | | | | as web services, n-tier as well as grid computing. |
| its uptime without a single point where failure could | | | | Data centre architecture is certainly far from the end |
| occur. | | | | of its evolution and new ideas are being developed at |
| Internet data centres known as, IDCs, are usually | | | | a rapid pace in order to attempt to keep up with |
| constructed to suit a particular service providers | | | | changes in requirements from their clients and also |
| needs, they are not generally "off-the-shelf". Those | | | | uninterruptible power supply requirements. |