As a result of some high-profile outages and the growing interest in running critical services in a public cloud, the reliability — and transparency — of public cloud services has come under scrutiny. Cloud services are designed to operate with low failure rates. Large (at-scale) cloud and IT service providers, such as Amazon Web Services, […]
Analyzing human error — with a view to preventing it — has always been challenging for data center operators. The cause of a failure can lie in how well a process was taught, how tired, well trained or resourced the staff are, or whether the equipment itself was unnecessarily difficult to operate. There are also […]
How is the Ukraine conflict affecting digital infrastructure and the data sector? In response to multiple queries, Uptime Institute Intelligence identified six main areas where operators and customers of digital infrastructure are experiencing effects from the conflict or will do so soon, not just in Europe but globally. (In Russia and Ukraine there are over […]
Pressed by a sense of urgency among scientists and the wider public, and by governments and investors who must fulfil promises made at COP (Conference of the Parties) summits, major businesses are facing ever more stringent sustainability reporting requirements. Big energy users, such as data centers, are in the firing line. Many of the reporting […]
As major businesses feel a growing sense of urgency to dramatically cut carbon emissions, opinions are starting to shift in favor of nuclear power, which is not classed as clean, but is a near-zero carbon energy source. The digital infrastructure industry, a major global consumer of energy, has a role to play in rehabilitating nuclear, […]
The data center and IT industry is a relatively minor — but nevertheless significant — contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
To track changing attitudes and responses to climate change and the related threats to infrastructure, Uptime Institute Intelligence concluded two global surveys in the fourth quarters of 2020 and 2021, respectively.
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 […]