The idea of using liquids to cool IT hardware, exemplified by technologies such as cold plates and immersion cooling, is frequently hailed as the ultimate solution to the data center’s energy efficiency and sustainability challenges. If a data center replaces air cooling with direct liquid cooling (DLC), chilled water systems can operate at higher supply […]
The suitability of a data center environment is primarily judged by its effect on the long-term health of IT hardware. Facility operators define their temperature and humidity set points with a view to balancing hardware failure rates against the associated capital and operational expenditures, with the former historically prioritized. Over the past decade, this balance […]
Regular readers of Uptime Institute’s annual data center survey, the longest running of its kind, already know that the industry average power usage effectiveness (PUE, a ratio of total site power and IT power) has trended sideways in recent years. Since 2020, it has been stuck in the 1.55 to 1.59 band. Even going back […]
Public cloud infrastructures have come a long way over the past 16 years to slowly earn the trust of enterprises in running their most important applications and storing sensitive data. In the Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2022, more than a third of enterprises that operate their own IT infrastructure said they also placed […]
Early in 2022, Uptime Intelligence observed that the return of Moore’s law in the data center (or, more accurately, the performance and energy efficiency gains associated with it) would come with major caveats (see Moore’s law resumes — but not for all). Next-generation server technologies’ potential to improve energy efficiency, Uptime Intelligence surmised at the […]
Data center operators and IT tenants have traditionally adopted a binary view of cooling performance: it either meets service level commitments, or it does not. The relationship is also coldly transactional: as long as sufficient volumes of air of the right temperature and quality (in accordance with service-level agreements that typically follow ASHRAE’s guidance) reach […]
Data centers have become victims of their own success. Ever-larger data centers have mushroomed across the globe in line with an apparently insatiable demand for computing and storage capacity. The associated energy use is not only expensive (and generating massive carbon emissions) but is also putting pressure on the grid. Most data center developments tend […]
The COVID-19 pandemic — and the subsequent disruption to supply chains — demonstrated the data center industry’s reliance on interdependent global markets and the components they produce. Although the data center sector was just one of many industries affected, the extensive variety of the often complex electrical and mechanical equipment involved exacerbated supply chain problems. […]
Uptime Institute’s outages database suggests data center fires are infrequent, and rarely have a significant impact on operations. Uptime has identified 14 publicly reported, high-profile data center outages caused by fire or fire suppression systems since 2020. The frequency of fires is not increasing relative to the IT load or number of data centers but, […]
When Uptime Institute Intelligence surveyed data center infrastructure operators about supply chain issues in August 2021, more than two-thirds of respondents had experienced some shortages in the previous 18 months. Larger operations bore the brunt of disruptions, largely due to shortages or delays in sourcing major electrical equipment (such as switchgear, engine generators and uninterruptible […]