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 […]
There are few organizations that have had as big an impact on data center design as ASHRAE — and specifically, their Technical Committee (TC) 9.9. ASHRAE’s 2004 publication Thermal guidelines for Data Processing Environments (now in its fourth edition) described the optimal environmental operating conditions for the electronics in a data center, and in doing so, effectively […]
When the PUE (power usage effectiveness) metric was first discussed at a meeting of The Green Grid in Santa Clara, back in 2007, a microphone stand was placed in each aisle of the auditorium. The importance of the initiative was understood even then: experts, including the founders of Uptime Institute, formed lines to give their […]
When Uptime Institute recently asked over 300 data center managers how the pandemic would change their operations, one answer stood out: Two-thirds expect to increase the resiliency of their core data center(s) in the years ahead. Many said they expected their costs to increase as a result. The reasoning is clear: the pandemic — or […]
As the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded, many people have suggested that the business case for enterprises to move more workloads to the public cloud has been strengthened. Some have argued that the pandemic will accelerate the decline of the enterprise data center. Is this actually the case? And if so, why? This is one of […]