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 […]
The US Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) issued multiple geomagnetic storm watches throughout August and September 2022. Geomagnetic storms occur when solar storms interact with the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field, risking disruption to satellites, radio communications and the power grid. The strongest predicted storm earned the agency’s rating of G3 (“strong”) on a five-level […]
Uptime Institute’s data on power usage effectiveness (PUE) is a testament to the progress the data center industry has made in energy efficiency over the past 10 years. However, global average PUEs have been largely stalling at close to 1.6 since 2018, with only marginal gains. This makes sense: for the average figure to show […]
As the data center sector increases its focus on becoming more environmentally sustainable, regulators still have a part to play — the question is to what extent?
The power usage effectiveness (PUE) metric is predominant thanks to its universal applicability and its simplicity: energy used by the entire data center, divided by energy used by the IT equipment.