When the PUE metric was first proposed and adopted at a Green Grid meeting in California in 2008, few could have forecast how important this simple ratio — despite its limitations — would become. Few would have expected, too, that the industry would make so little progress on another metric proposed at those same early […]
Research has shown that while data center owners and operators are mostly in favor of sustainability regulation, they have a low opinion of the regulators’ expertise. Some operators have cited Germany’s Energy Efficiency Act as evidence: the law lays down a set of extremely challenging power usage effectiveness (PUE) requirements that will likely force some […]
In the past year, Uptime Intelligence has been asked more questions about generative AI and its impact on the data center sector than any other topic. The questions come from enterprise and colocation operators, suppliers of a wide variety of equipment and services, regulators and the media. Most of the questions concern power consumption. The […]
For more than a decade, the data center industry — and the wider digital infrastructure that relies on it — has lived with the threat of much greater sustainability legislation or other forms of mandatory or semi-mandatory controls. But in a period of boom, it has mostly been a background worry, with legislators more concerned […]
In recent reports, Uptime Institute Intelligence has warned that a wave of resiliency, security and sustainability legislation is making its way toward the statute books. Governments around the world — aware that digital infrastructure is increasingly critical to economic and national security (and consumes a lot of power) — have decided the sector cannot be […]
ANALYST OPINION In a recent report on server energy efficiency, Uptime Intelligence’s Dr. Tomas Rahkonen analyzed data from 429 servers and identified five key insights (see Server energy efficiency: five key insights). All were valuable observations for better managing (and reducing) IT power consumption, but one area of his analysis stood out: the efficiency benefits […]
The European Commission’s (EC’s) proposed recast of its Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) sets out new and strict reporting requirements for data centers operating in the EU. If passed, data centers with 100 kilowatts or more total installed IT power demand (from server, storage and network equipment) will have to report their energy performance every year, […]
The value, role and safety of nuclear power has strongly divided opinion, both in favor of and against, since the 1950s. This debate has now, in 2022, reached a critical point again as energy security and prices cause increasing concern globally (particularly in geographies such as Europe) and as the climate crisis requires energy producers […]
Nearly 15 years ago – in 2008 – Uptime Institute presented a paper titled “The gathering storm.” The paper was about the inevitability of a struggle against climate change and how this might play out for the power-hungry data center and IT sector. The issues were explored in more detail in the 2020 Uptime Institute […]
In recent years, Uptime Institute has published regular reports examining both the rate and causes of data center and IT service outages. The reports, which have been widely read and reported in the media, paint a picture of an industry that is struggling with resiliency and reliability — and one where operators regularly suffer downtime, […]