Data Center and Cloud Systems

The terms “data center” and “cloud” are now intertwined in the tech industry. Datacenter once meant the physical concentration of digital storage for a large organization. Now, a data center often houses the storage (and often the computing) for an organization’s customers, and this is typically where the term “cloud” is used.

One thing most data centers have in common is that they house tightly packed systems with many drives per chassis, to maximize storage per square foot. With all those systems, power costs are a big factor. And of course, the costs of buying and maintaining all that hardware, with very high expectations in terms of “no downtime,” are a driving force for most datacenters. But as far as workload, performance, and reliability expectations on the drives, a wide range of applications within “the data center” have created room for a range of drive solutions, from Cost Optimized Cloud drives to Performance Enterprise drives.