Big IT outages are occurring with growing regularity, many with severe consequences. Executives, industry authorities and governments alike are responding with more rules, calls for more transparency and a more formal approach to end-to-end, holistic resiliency. Creeping criticality IT outages and data center downtime can cause huge disruption. That is hardly news: veterans with long […]
In her book “Surveillance Capitalism,” the Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff describes how some software and service providers have been collecting vast amounts of data, with the goal of tracking, anticipating, shaping and even controlling the behavior of individuals. She sees it as a threat to individual freedom, to business and to democracy. Zuboff outlines the […]
In 2012, Microsoft announced that it planned to eliminate engine generators at its big data center campus in Quincey, Oregon. Six years later the same group, with much the same aspirations, filed for permission to install 72 diesel generators, which have an expected life of at least a decade. This example illustrates clearly just how […]
The digital infrastructure industry continues to grow and change at a striking price. Across the world, a thriving community of investors, designers, owners and operators are grappling with many of the same issues: resiliency and risk, the impact of cloud, the move to the edge, rapid innovation, and unpredictable (although mostly upward) demand. What should […]
One of the most widely cited metrics in the IT industry is for availability, expressed in the form of a number of nines: three nines for 99.9% availability (minutes of downtime per year), extending to six nines — 99.9999% — or even, very rarely, seven nines. What this should mean in practice is show in […]
In the movie “Mary Poppins,” Mr. Banks sings that a British bank must be run with precision, and that “Tradition, discipline and rules must be the tools.” Otherwise, he warns, “Disorder! Chaos!” will ensue. One rule, introduced by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in 2018, suggests that disorder and chaos might be quite common […]
In a recent Uptime Institute Intelligence note, we considered a June 2019 report issued by the US General Accounting Office (GAO) on the IT resiliency of US airlines. The GAO wanted to better understand if the all-too-frequent IT outages and resultant chaos passengers face have any common causes and if so, how they could be […]
The spectacular growth of the public cloud has many drivers, only one of which is the deployment, redevelopment or migration of enterprise IT into the cloud. But many groups within the industry — data center builders and operators, hardware and software suppliers, networking companies, and providers of skills and services alike — are closely watching […]
Recently I attended the Data Center Dynamics (DCD) Smart Energy conference in Stockholm. During a panel discussion on energy, data centers and innovation, David Hall (Senior Director of Technology Innovation for Equinix) made two observations, almost in passing, about metrics and monitoring. Both were intriguing and, to my ears, suggested that operators’ thinking about sustainability […]
Smart Energy is getting a lot of airplay in the data center world at present. New or planned products that fall under this broad banner include Energy-as-a-Service uninterruptible power supplies, software-defined power systems, and adaptable redundant systems that enable operators to raise or reduce their level of redundancy according to business needs. It might be […]