As the pandemic began to make an impact in early 2020, it became clear that data center operators were going to have to invest more if they were to provide the services on which their customers were increasingly reliant. Short-term needs included protective equipment, deep cleaning and, it seemed likely, more spending to support extended […]
The catastrophic fire that occurred at OVHcloud’s SBG2 data center in Strasbourg, France (see last week’s blog about it) has led many operators to question their vulnerability to fires. Fires at data centers are a constant concern, but are rare. In almost all cases of data center fire, the source is quickly located, the equipment isolated, […]
The fire that destroyed a data center (and damaged others) at the OVHcloud facility in Strasbourg, France, on March 10-11, 2021, has raised a multitude of questions from concerned data center operators and customers around the world. Chief among these is, “What was the main cause, and could it have been prevented?” Fires at data […]
Recent extreme weather-related events in the US (the big freeze in Texas, fires on the west coast) have once again highlighted the need for data center operators to reassess their risks in the face of climate change. The topic is discussed in depth in the Uptime Institute report (available to Uptime Institute members) entitled, The gathering […]
In Uptime Institute’s recent report on preparing for the extreme effects of climate change, there were over a dozen references to the dangers of extremely hot weather, which can overwhelm cooling systems and trigger regional fires that disrupt power, connectivity and staff access. But the effects of extreme cold were discussed only in passing. The […]
Power failures have always been one of the top causes of serious IT service outages. The loss of power to a data center can be devastating, and its consequences have fully justified the huge expense and effort that go into preventing such events. But in recent years, other causes are catching up, with networking issues […]
Through 2021 and beyond, the world will begin to recover from its acute crisis — COVID-19 — and will turn its attention to other matters. Few if any of these issues will be as important as climate change, a chronic condition that will become more pressing and acute as each year passes. In the critical […]
Outsourcing the requirement to own and operate data center capacity is the cornerstone of many digital transformation strategies, with almost every large enterprise spreading their workloads across their own data centers, colocation sites and public cloud. But ask any regulator, any chief executive, any customer: You can’t outsource responsibility — for incidents, outages, security breaches […]
Density is rising The power density per rack (kilowatts [kW] per cabinet) is a critical number in data center design, capacity planning, and cooling and power provisioning. There have been industry warnings about a meteoric rise in IT equipment rack power density for the past decade (at least). One reason for this prediction is the […]
Data center capacity is rapidly expanding in outsourced, third-party IT venues, such as colocation data centers and public cloud. Whether measured in megawatts (MW) of uninterruptible power supply capacity or IT load (or by some other measure, such as square feet of white or leased space, or in units of compute or storage) overall capacity […]