The Real Story: What’s the difference between a data center and a hyperscale data center?

SOUTH BEND, Ind.- What separates a hyperscale data center from a typical data center?

ABC57’s Jordan Tolbert spoke with Edward Hamner, Digital Infrastructure Programs Manager for North America at the International Data Center Authority. It's a think tank that focuses on best practices for digital infrastructure–including data centers.

He says data centers are relevant for modern needs, upgrading from a server room in an office building, for example, to the larger structures we’ve come to know. Data centers have more computing capability, cooling, and security, according to Hamner.

He says a hyperscale data center is still a data center, but it’s a type.

“The reason they're called hyperscale is because of the scale at which they're spread. So, the major players in the space are global, meaning almost anywhere in the world, you'll be able to quickly get access to your photos, your emails, your text messages, anything that's stored in the cloud,” said Hamner.

He says businesses and people can use these. Hamner says if you have an iPhone and use the cloud, you’re using a hyperscale data center.

“So, what these hyperscalers have done is they have these large, you know, campuses, generally pretty large, that are scalable throughout the world, where you can effectively purchase or lease the cloud space,” said Hamner. “So, for a subscription fee, rather than having to hire a whole team and build out a computer room or your own data center, they provide those services for us at a much more efficient cost basis in a much more secure fashion, just because again, this is their primary course of business, so they do it well and they do it at scale.”

He says some of the major players are companies like Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple and Oracle.

“The other thing that they have is the technology. So they're able to support high—as we call it, high-density, but effectively, very compact processes that take a lot of computing power to process. And so they have, you know, cooling technologies that are more advanced to keep the servers cold, which means that they can do a lot more of that processing in a much smaller or denser space,” said Hamner.

So he says these data centers can support the cloud with high-density computing and can keep the cost relatively low–because they do it from a network of places. Also, it’s often all they do.

“The reason for them being all over the place is as simple as making sure you can always access your services, making sure that it's always available. In our industry, we like to call it redundancy, but the more you have, the more secure the network is. So, if something happens to one hyperscale site, they have others throughout the country, throughout the world, that make sure that network stays online,” said Hamner.

But as for a traditional data center, he says there is still a big use for them in industries like finance or healthcare for example.

The difference is because they're not supporting all sorts of —all different types of services. Generally, the technologies are a little bit more, you know, legacy, if you will, or a little older,” said Hamner.

To summarize, a hyperscale data center basically operates on a larger scale than a typical data center and supports the cloud. According to Hamner, they compute faster–are more efficient than a typical data center and are more cost-effective than storing and processing data yourself.

Separate from this topic, it is worth noting that Hyperscale Data Inc. is a company that develops data centers, like the one in Dowagiac, for example.