A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. It generally includes redundant or backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental control and various security devices.

Data centers have their roots in the huge computer rooms of the early ages of the computing industry. Early computer systems required special environment in which to operate and important security system to protect the devices – computer were expensive and often they were used for military purposes.
In the Eighties computers were deploy everywhere and, as the information technology (IT) operations became  to be more and more complex, also grew the need to control IT resources.
At this point societies start to install servers in a special room inside the branch, to facilitate sharing unique resources between multiple users.

The boom of data center came during the dot-com bubble (1997-2000), when companies needed fast internet connectivity and non-stop operation to deploy system and to establish a presence on the Internet. From that moment many companies start building large facilities, called Internet data center or, in case of cloud connectivity, Cloud data center.

Nowadays content moving closer to customers and this is driving growth of data center even more. Industry experts estimate that  within 2019:

• IP traffic will grow 3x at compound annual growth rate of 23%;
• IP traffic will reach 168.0 Exabytes per month (in 2014 were estimated 59.8 Exabytes per month);
• Global IP networks will carry 5.5 Exabytes per day (2.0 Exabytes per day in 2014);
• Globally IP traffic will reach an annual run rate of 2.0 Zettabytes (718.2 Exabytes in 2014);
• IP traffic will reach 22 Gigabytes per capita (up from 8 Gigabytes per capita in 2014).

The new wide variety of motivations and needs have created 5 different categories of data center, known as:

1. CSP – Communication Service Providers: traditional telco companies that offer voice, data to residential customer;
2. CNP – Carrier Neutral Providers: multisite, terabit-scale data center operators focused on providing co-location, power and interconnect functions;
3. ICP – Internet Content Providers: primary business is the creation, storage and dissemination of digital information (e.g. Amazon, Google, eBay …);
4. G – Government: municipal, city, state/provincial and national government organizations that interconnect facilities and research and education networks;
5. E – Enterprise: enterprises in vertical that operate data centers (e.g. financial, healthcare, media, manufacturing, utilities).

So many different data center necessities have to be settled with competitive technological solutions.

Our partner MRV, global leader in converged packet and optical solutions,  is able to find an answer to several data center applications, such as  peering PoP offload, 100G access to data center, low latency interconnect, disaster recovery, optical demarcation for cloud services, data center mesh, multi-protocol DCI, etc.
MRV’s Optical Transport Solutions enable data centers to:

• Reduce rack space and real estate costs by up to 75% with high-density chassis supporting over Terabit of capacity;
• Reduce electrical costs for 10G and 100G optical transport with less than 0.7 watts per GigE of bandwidth, resulting in more than 50% electrical cost savings;
• Reduce the need for testing equipment, manpower requirements for configuration since the solutions come with built-in testing capabilities;
• Speed service turn-up from days to hours with simultaneous testing of all channels;
• Maximize resiliency by increasing granularity so transmission issues stay localized;
• Support real-time applications with ultra-low latency optical transport;
• Support high-availability carrier grade network and system designs;
• High-density modular design for optimal and simplified scalability;
• Open and programmable solution for Optical SDN

MRV portfolio matches with any requirements, with lowers equipment and manpower requirements, lower cost of components, with multi-rate and multi-protocol modules.
The flexible design of MRV products, has reduced latency transport network and it has multiple redundancy options on port, card, chassis, with weak power consumption.