The Evolution of Data Center

Today, the design and performance of data center are extremely different from data center in early years. If you take a look at modern data center, you can easily find out that it is more functional and sophisticated. The availability of cloud computing system even makes data center building less. These happen because data center has undergone an evolution, a process that improves the functions and capabilities of data center.

Actually, the concepts of data center were firstly introduced in late 1950s by American Airlines and IBM. In early 1960s, serious commercial system arrived in the market, leading to enterprise scale data centers. In 1971, Intel created 4004 processor. This was the first general purpose programmable processor. Engineers could customize the processor with certain software in order to make it function as intended. Next, Xerox Alto, the first desktop computer to use graphical UI, was introduced in 1973. This computer had large internal memory storage, special software and high resolution screen. In 1977, the first LAN, ARCnet was introduced. This system was used at Chase Manhattan Bank. The data rate of the system was 2.5 Mbps and it connected 255 computers within the network. In 1978, business of commercial disaster recovery was introduced by SunGard.

Further, personal computers were introduced in 1981. In early 1990s, the term data centers started to be used widely. It was used to refer computer rooms. In mid 1990s, the popularity of data center as a service model was increasing. Then, in 1997, Apple created virtual personal computer to solve software incompatibilities. In 2001, bare metal hypervisors were launched by VMware ESX. In 2002, Amazon Web Services through Amazon Mechanical Turk started the development of cloud based services. They started offering cloud computing to businesses. Today, many businesses had used cloud computing for data center while many others planned to use.