How We Got Here: History of Data Centers and Current Choices
Ronald H. Bowman Jr. · 2012
This chapter discusses the history of data centers and choices available. Data centers of the 1980s and the early 1990s were often underfunded afterthoughts of the corporate world. Chief financial officers (CFOs) were often in charge of the decision-making for large capital spending, and the IT executive or chief information officer did not have a place at the table to speak for or on the behalf of the data center. Apart from having low power, data centers had low cooling standards and were monolithic and not nimble in design. This situation continued until 1996 and the era of telecom deregulation. At present, there are three choices for data centers: stand-alone data center, shared infrastructure and multitenant asset, and collocation-caged environments. These choices can satisfy mission-critical needs in urban environments, where cross-connectivity or layer-one, layer-two, and layer-three solutions can have choice and various architecture.