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 […]
One of the more intriguing results of the Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2019 concerned energy efficiency. For years, data centers have become ever more efficient, with power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratings across the industry (apparently) falling. Big operators, such as hyperscale cloud companies and big colos, regularly claim annual or design PUE figures […]
Avoiding IT service outages is a big concern for any operator or service provider, especially one providing a business-critical service. But when an outage does occur, the business impact can vary from “barely noticeable” to “huge and expensive.” Anticipating and modeling the impact of a service interruption should be a part of incident planning and is key […]