Many people don’t even know about data centers, and almost everything in the digital world depends on them.
The modern world is impossible to imagine without the Internet – it is a link, thanks to which there is an economy, production, social activity, and everything that can be supposed. Any movement of a person at the moment in one way or another is connected with the transmission of information on the Internet – ordering food, sending mail, communicating with friends, searching for goods in the online store, watching commercials, streaming tv series, or music. And just as a person can not imagine his life without the Internet, the Internet itself can not exist without data centers. Let’s find out what they are and what their importance is.
Server House – Reliability, Security, and Temperature
Data centers, data centers ( data centers), are “home to servers” – it is specially equipped premises or entire buildings in which servers are stored and the network equipment necessary to connect to the Internet. Most often, large data centers serve corporate clients by renting out their hardware. For example, a data center can provide a large company with the capacity to store a customer database, hand over its servers to a hosting provider, provide the necessary capacity to large financial institutions or even government agencies.
However, large data centers can serve private customers who get to rent a whole physical server or just a place in the server rack to install their equipment. In any case, data center services for a private client or company are pretty profitable in financial terms. There is no need to rent a room, buy expensive equipment, hire security, build a cooling system, and so on. And, most importantly, without such data centers to imagine the existence of the modern Internet, and with it the world’s standing, it is simply impossible.
Reliability is the most important option.
It should be understood that data centers have specific requirements, based on which the reliability of the data center is determined, and reliability, in this case, is a fundamental factor that potential customers pay attention to. For example, some particularly protected centers are built on locations that are not subject to seismic activity, are far from the possible flood line, and are not frequent centers of weather disasters.
Also, unsurprisingly, data centers are always equipped with an uninterrupted power supply system due to batteries or generators. This is to ensure that data center customers will still have access to their equipment and data in an emergency. There is also an advanced cooling system, as the server equipment provides a lot of heat, a full-fledged security system, and a whole staff of specialists responsible for the performance of the entire data center.
Speed, speed, and speed again.
Naturally, in addition to reliability, which plays a key role, the potential data center client also pays attention to the performance of the servers and the speed of access to the necessary information. And thanks to solid-state drives, the last parameter develops in seven-mile steps. Every high-level data center is currently equipped with SSD because of the speed of reading and recording data, an extensive resource of development for failure, low energy consumption, and the relatively high level of reliability of storage of information. On HDD, of course, data is also stored, but most often, these drives are used in cases where volume is essential for a minimum price, not speed.
Accordingly, hardware manufacturers, i.e., SSD in this situation, try every year to provide data centers with lower energy consumption, an extensive resource of development on failure, the speed of writing/reading, and, importantly, the price. Fortunately, over the past few years, the cost of large-volume solid-state drives has decreased markedly so that potential data center customers get access to stored information at excessive speeds.
You can check your internet speed here.
Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN640 – the mainstream in the SSD server market
For example, Western Digital has a very modern Drive Ultrastar DC SN640, which was created specifically for the needs of servers in data centers. This is the NVMe SSD on the 96-layer BiCS4 3D TLC NAND, which runs on the PCIe Gen 3.1 1×4 interface with a reasonably high access rate (reading 3340 MB/sec and recording 1200 MB/s), low power consumption, and the ability to operate in a sufficiently strict temperature mode from 0 to 70 degrees C. Naturally, the drives of this line have increased resilience, they have a guarantee of five years, and the total allowable amount of recorded data is simply insane.
It’s worth clarifying here that the Ultrastar DC SN640 line has two classes of drives – the first with a 960GB increment (0.96/1.92/3.84/7.68 TB) providing a potential customer with a lower cost of storing 1GB of data, and the second with 800 GB increments (0.8/1.6/3.2/6.4 TB) is designed for higher data recording intensity. Accordingly, the first class of SN640 dwpD (Disk Write per Day – the allowable number of rewrites of the entire storage volume per day) is 0.8 DWPD. The minimum volume storage can rewrite 1.4 PB (1.4×106 GB) of data for five warranty years – a considerable amount. The second class of drives already has 2 DWPDs, so the 6.4TB maximum model can rewrite more than 23 PB (23×106GB) of information in five years.
The Ultrastar DC SN640 line is actively used for data caching, data storage, data processing, or even the cloud with such impressive features. What’s more, the lineup is optimized to maximize performance when performing mixed-load tasks, which is essential for virtualization, web servers, enterprise client file systems, OLTP, NoS’L, and email servers.
Western Digital Ultrastar DC SN840 – the best SSD for the corporate sector
Although the SN840 uses the same PCIe 3.1 1×4 interface, 96-layer 3D TLC NAND memory, and NVMe 1.3c memory controller, it’s already a two-port drive that is the pinnacle enterprise SSD evolution. In this line, the customer gets an even higher speed of access to data (3470 MB/sec for reading and 2300 MB/s on the record), a much larger maximum storage volume, ultra-low latency, and, of course, constant access to user data.
For example, a potential buyer can order a 15.36TB drive, an impressive storage space for various important information. At the same time, the SN840 range also has two classes of drives with DWPD 1 and 3. For example, in the case of the second class, with a 6.4TB drive over five warranty years, you can rewrite 35 PB (35×106GB) of data. That is, this line in terms of performance even slightly wins from a fellow.
As a result, Ultrastar DC SN840 is used in cloud technology for hyper-stamping computing, online transactions and banking, data analytics, databases, artificial intelligence training, and machine learning.
The more powerful the SSD in data centers, the better it is for everyone
Now we can safely say that the development of solid-state drives created for the corporate sector and work in data centers is even more critical than the upgrade of custom SSDs. After all, the more reliable, faster, and cheaper SSD for data centers, the more content the user can get, the quicker streaming services will work, artificial intelligence, Internet banking, various platforms, information resources, and everything that can be found on the vast Internet.
