A traditional data center consists of physical infrastructure and hardware located in a centralized facility. It houses computing resources like servers, storage, and network equipment. A traditional data center requires purchasing, installing, and maintaining physical hardware on-premises.
A virtual data center, on the other hand, utilizes virtualization and cloud computing technologies to emulate the capabilities of a physical data center in a virtual environment. Rather than having physical infrastructure, a virtual data center provides compute, storage, and network resources as virtualized services. Multiple virtual servers and resources can be hosted on the same underlying physical hardware. A virtual data center enables scalability and flexibility without having to purchase and manage physical assets.
Physical Infrastructure
A traditional data center consists of the physical components and facilities needed to house enterprise IT infrastructure (Traditional Data Center vs. Virtualization – Differences and …). This includes server racks, networking equipment, cooling systems, power systems, cabling, and physical security components. Traditional data centers require a specially constructed physical facility or dedicated space within a building to house the infrastructure. This includes reinforced floors, raised floors or anti-static flooring, enhanced cooling and ventilation, cabling racks and pathways, and physical access controls. The data center physical infrastructure provides the power, cooling, and space needed to operate servers, storage, networking gear, and other IT hardware (Data Center Infrastructure 101.).
Location
A key difference between traditional and virtual data centers is the physical location of infrastructure and hardware. Traditional data centers are contained within a single physical site or building. All of the servers, switches, routers, and other IT equipment reside in a centralized on-premises facility (Park Place Technologies). In contrast, virtual data centers distribute resources across multiple sites, often leveraging cloud computing. Rather than being restricted to one physical location, virtual data centers can have hardware, services, and applications spread out in various data centers or cloud regions (Talend). This provides geographic redundancy and flexibility.
Hardware Ownership
One key difference between traditional and virtual data centers is who owns the physical hardware like servers, storage, and network equipment. In a traditional data center, the organization owns and manages their own hardware infrastructure. They purchase, install, and maintain the physical servers and other IT equipment in their facility (Source). The organization has full control over their hardware, but also takes on the costs of upfront capital expenditures and ongoing maintenance.
With a virtual data center, the organization leases hardware capacity from a cloud provider like AWS or Azure. The cloud provider owns and manages the physical infrastructure, while the organization pays only for the capacity they use. This eliminates large upfront investments in hardware and shifts the model to an operating expense rather than capital expense. It also offloads the burden of hardware maintenance and upgrades to the cloud provider. However, the organization gives up some control and customization of the hardware systems since they do not own it themselves (Source).
Scalability
One key difference between traditional and virtual data centers is in scalability. Traditional data centers have limited scalability due to their physical infrastructure. Adding or upgrading hardware requires purchasing, installing, and configuring new equipment which takes significant time and planning. The finite physical capacity puts a ceiling on maximum processing power and storage space.
Virtual data centers, in contrast, provide highly elastic scalability. Resources like servers and storage can be spun up or down on-demand through software. This makes it easy to scale up seamlessly to handle usage spikes or additional workloads. Additional infrastructure resources can be provisioned in minutes without having to purchase and install new hardware. This agility and flexibility is a major benefit of the virtual model.
Costs
There are significant cost differences between traditional and virtual data centers in terms of capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenditures (OpEx). With traditional data centers, there are high CapEx costs for purchasing physical hardware, building or renting data center facilities, and installing power and cooling infrastructure. According to Liquid Web, organizations can save 50-70% on hardware costs with a virtual data center since hardware is leased on-demand. Virtual data centers have more flexibility with OpEx spending on subscription licenses, cloud usage fees, and network bandwidth as needed.
In contrast, traditional data centers require major upfront investment in owned infrastructure and equipment. There is less flexibility to scale CapEx spending up or down. Traditional data centers also have higher ongoing operating costs for maintenance, electricity, real estate, staffing, and other overheads. As summarized by Park Place Technologies, virtual resources are paid for only when provisioned versus physical resources that must be powered, cooled, and secured when idle.
Speed and Agility
Virtual data centers enable much faster deployment of new infrastructure compared to traditional data centers. With virtualization software, new virtual servers, storage, and networking can be spun up in minutes rather than the days or weeks it takes to procure and configure physical hardware (Parallels).
Changes and updates can also be rolled out much quicker in a virtual environment. Adjusting hardware resources like CPU, memory, and storage can be done instantly for a virtual machine. In a traditional data center, these types of changes require procuring new physical servers or storage systems and migrating workloads, which is very time consuming (Darwin’s Data).
The speed and agility of virtual data centers gives organizations far more flexibility to adapt and innovate. They can spin up new environments in minutes to test applications or ideas out. With traditional data centers, organizations are limited by the time and costs of procuring physical infrastructure.
Security
One of the key differences between traditional and virtual data centers is security. Physical data centers have inherent security measures like perimeter fencing, security guards, camera surveillance, and access control systems. However, they present a single point of failure – if the physical data center is breached or damaged, the entire infrastructure is compromised. According to Park Place Technologies, traditional data centers “have a challenging time achieving the CIA triad of information security: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability.”
In contrast, virtual data centers distribute resources across multiple physical locations, so there is no single point of failure. Resources and workloads can be shifted dynamically to respond to attacks or outages. As outlined by TechTarget, “Spreading data center resources across different physical locations enhances continuity and disaster recovery plans. If one site experiences downtime, virtualized workloads shift to alternate sites.” The distributed model provides inherent redundancy. Virtual data centers also enable efficient security patching and upgrades since resources are abstracted from underlying hardware.
Reliability
Reliability is a key consideration when choosing between a traditional data center and a virtual data center. Traditional data centers have a single point of failure – if the data center goes down due to power outage, cooling system failure, or a natural disaster, all systems will be unavailable until the issue is resolved and the data center comes back online. This represents a major risk for critical systems and applications.
Virtual data centers have a distributed model, with resources spread across different physical locations. This provides built-in redundancy so that if one location experiences downtime, services can failover to alternate sites. Resources are replicated across sites for high availability. According to TechTarget, cloud environments offer superior reliability through optimized platforms and redundancy across distributed infrastructure.
Overall, virtual data centers eliminate the single point of failure risk and offer higher reliability. However, traditional data centers may implement redundancy through backup power generators, redundant cooling systems, multiple connectivity links, etc. But these require additional investments and operational overhead.
Conclusion
In summary, the main differences between a traditional data center and a virtual data center are:
A traditional data center consists of physical servers and hardware located in a physical building, while a virtual data center utilizes virtualized servers and resources that are not tied to a physical location.
Traditional data centers require purchasing and maintaining hardware, while virtual data centers leverage shared hardware resources that can be scaled on-demand.
Virtual data centers are generally more agile, scalable and cost-effective compared to traditional data centers. However, traditional data centers offer stronger performance, security and control.
A traditional data center model makes most sense for organizations that need maximum performance, security sensitive applications, or total control over infrastructure. A virtual model is preferable for agility, flexibility, and cost savings.