Wikijunior:How Things Work/Data Center

Who invented it?
Data centers have existed since the early days of computing although they had a different name then. They were often called computer rooms.

How does it get power?
It gets electricity from big wires that enter the data center and let the computers do their job.

How dangerous is it?
They are not very dangerous at all, as long as the datacenter remains uninfected by computer viruses.

What does it do?
It contains hundreds or thousands of computers that can do everything from running a bank to streaming video.

It can remember lots of things about lots of people and places and other stuff, and it stores a lot of info.

How has it changed the world?
Data centers run the Internet. Whenever you use Microsoft to challenge your friends on XBOX Live, you’re using a data center. The Wikimedia Foundation has databases in a data center to let you read this book.

Many businesses use a datacenter as their "Cloud" for servers and storage. The datacenter also has "Firewalls" as the first point of entry from an external computer, that allow or deny access to the devices behind them. These firewalls see millions of packets daily and their rules quickly determine access permissions. There are also devices like load balancers and switches in the datacenter that carry the load of all these communication packets. The load balancer site in front of several servers and spreads the load of the work among them.

What idea(s) and/or inventions had to be developed before it could be created?
We needed computers, cables, before we had data centers.