The digital infrastructure industry is under pressure to measure and improve the energy efficiency of the computing work that underpins digital services. Enterprises seek to maximize returns on cost outlay and operating expenses for IT hardware, and regulators and local communities need reassurance that the energy devoted to data centers is used efficiently. These objectives […]
Many grid operators are struggling to meet customer power demands — in both volume and quality. As demand rises, utilities must also monitor and account for customer usage patterns that can degrade power quality (and add costs) for others on the grid. A 2024 Bloomberg analysis revealed a concentration of residential power issues occurring near […]
The enthusiasm for generative AI is attracting serious investment, and the associated power and cooling requirements will pose a significant challenge for the data centers that house it. Upcoming AI training clusters will escalate silicon power and rack density to unprecedented heights, upending infrastructure design conventions and accelerating the adoption of cold plate and immersion […]
Direct liquid cooling (DLC), including cold plate and immersion systems, is becoming more common in data centers — but so far this transition has been gradual and unevenly distributed with some data centers using it widely, others not at all. The use of DLC in 2024 still accounts for only a small minority of the […]
A growing number of data center operators and equipment vendors are anticipating the proliferation of direct liquid cooling systems (DLC) over the next few years. As far as projections go, Uptime Institute’s surveys agree: the industry consensus for the mainstream adoption of liquid-cooled IT converges on the latter half of the 2020s. DLC systems, such […]
Uptime Institute calculates an industry average power usage effectiveness (PUE), which is a ratio of total site power to IT power, each year using data from the Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey. This PUE data is pulled from a large sample over the course of 15 years and provides a reliable view of progress […]
Two persistent trends in data center staffing are in apparent tension. The 2023 Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey confirmed, once again, that operations teams are struggling to attract and retain qualified staff. The severity of this shortage should justify aggressive hiring from all available labor sources — yet data centers still employ shockingly few […]
The energy crisis of 2022, resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, caused serious problems for data center operators in Europe. Energy prices leapt up and are likely to stay high. This has resulted in ongoing concerns that utilities in some European countries, which have a mismatch of supply and demand, will have to shed loads. […]
A proposed permanent network of electromagnetic monitoring stations across the continental US, operating in tandem with a machine learning (ML) algorithm, could facilitate accurate predictions of geomagnetic disturbances (GMDs). If realized, this predictive system could help grid operators avert disruption and reduce the likelihood of damage to their — and their customers’ — infrastructure, including […]
Standard IT hardware was a boon for data centers: for almost two decades, mainstream servers have had relatively constant power and cooling requirements. This technical stability moored the planning and design of facilities (for both new builds and retrofits) and has helped attract investment in data center capacity and technical innovation. Furthermore, many organizations are […]