What is the diferrence between a server room and a data centre?

A server room is a dedicated space within a building in which an organisations places the IT servers, storage and switches at the hear of its IT operation. The server room will provide a secure and managed environment utilising critical infrastructure and support systems. These will include critical power (uninterruptible power supplies), cooling (air conditioning), fire suppression and environmental monitoring for temperature, humidity and water leakage. Access to the room itself my be managed via an access control system, and this may alo provide additional secure access to the server racks.

In a server room, server racks are used to house the 19inch rack mount servers, storage and IT devices. A server rack provides a secure and easy to manage wya to organise the rackmounted devices. A server room will have at least one or more server racks and for a small-to-medium sized business or organisation the number of server racks could be 10 or more. This number could reach one hundred or more dependent upon the size of the business or organisation and its computing needs. KVM switches are used to manage the server network within the server room or remotely.

A data centre is an entire building dedicated to the management and operation of the server rooms or data halls within and servces no other purpose. Data centres can provide IT service to the organisation that owns it, referred to as an Enterprise data centre or be a colocation data centre that provide services including rack hosting, server hosting and web hosting. A colocation data centre operator owns the hardware and rents space to clients.

Server rooms and data centres are designed to be resilient with metrics used to measure their availability and energy efficiency. They are designed to achieve a level of availability using N+X redundancy in ther crtiical infrastructure systems. The most commonly used rating system for data centre resilience is the Uptime Institute’s Tier-rating and for energy efficiency Power Usage Effectiveness by the Green Grid.

The term data centre, may also be written as datacentre or in the United States as a data center or datacenter.