A computer facility that is devoid of humans most of the time. The "darkened" refers to lights out to save power except when equipment is being installed, removed or repaired. With printers distributed throughout the enterprise and the use of tape and optical libraries that automatically mount the required cartridge, the data center increasingly requires limited human intervention. Cloud computing facilities on the Internet are generally darkened data centers. See
server farm,
green data center,
cloud computing and
dark factory.