Design


FinOps gives hope to those struggling with cloud costs

FinOps gives hope to those struggling with cloud costs

Cloud workloads are continuing to grow — sometimes adding to traditional on-premises workloads, sometimes replacing them. The Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2023 shows that organizations expect the public cloud to account for 15% of their workloads by 2025. When private cloud hosting and software as a service (SaaS) are included, this share rises […]

What role might generative AI play in the data center?

What role might generative AI play in the data center?

This is the first in a series of reports on artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on the data center sector.

Looking for the x-factor in data center efficiency

Looking for the x-factor in data center efficiency

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 […]

Emerging regulatory requirements: tactics for riding the tsunami

Emerging regulatory requirements: tactics for riding the tsunami

Over the past 12 months, Uptime Institute Intelligence has been closely following regulatory developments in the area of sustainability. These include mandates based on the Task force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure standard, such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the UK’s Climate-related Financial Disclosure Regulations, and the EU’s Energy Efficiency Directive. These legal […]

AI will have a limited role in data centers — for now

AI will have a limited role in data centers — for now

The topic of artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the public’s imaginations, and now barely a week goes by without reports of another breakthrough. Among the many, sometimes dramatic predictions made by experts and non-experts alike is the potential elimination of some, or even many, jobs. These expectations are partly — but only partly — mirrored […]

The strong case for power management

The strong case for power management

ANALYST OPINION In a recent report on server energy efficiency, Uptime Intelligence’s Dr. Tomas Rahkonen analyzed data from 429 servers and identified five key insights (see Server energy efficiency: five key insights). All were valuable observations for better managing (and reducing) IT power consumption, but one area of his analysis stood out: the efficiency benefits […]

Cloud resiliency: plan to lose control of your planes

Cloud resiliency: plan to lose control of your planes

Cloud providers divide the technologies that underpin their services into two ”planes”, each with a different architecture and availability goal. The control plane manages resources in the cloud; the data plane runs the cloud buyer’s application. In this Update, Uptime Institute Intelligence presents research that shows control planes have poorer availability than data planes. This […]

Server efficiency increases again — but so do the caveats

Server efficiency increases again — but so do the caveats

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 […]

Cooling to play a more active role in IT performance and efficiency

Cooling to play a more active role in IT performance and efficiency

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 […]

Energy-efficiency focus to shift to IT — at last

Energy-efficiency focus to shift to IT — at last

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 […]

Forecasting the solar storm threat

Forecasting the solar storm threat

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 […]

Data center costs set to rise and rise

Data center costs set to rise and rise

Up until two years ago, the cost of building and operating data centers had been falling reasonably steeply. Improving technology, greater production volumes as the industry expanded and consolidated, large-scale builds, prefabricated and modular construction techniques, stable energy prices and the low costs of capital have all played a part. While labor costs have risen […]

Too hot to handle? Operators to struggle with new chips

Too hot to handle? Operators to struggle with new chips

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 […]

Unravelling net zero

Unravelling net zero

Many digital infrastructure operators have set themselves carbon-neutral or net-zero emissions goals: some large hyperscale operators claim net-zero emissions for their current operating year. Signatories to the Climate Neutral Data Center Pact, a European organization for owners and operators, aim to be using 100% clean energy by 2030. All these proclamations appear laudable and seem […]

Major data center fire highlights criticality of IT services

Major data center fire highlights criticality of IT services

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, […]

Rising energy prices

Will high energy prices push operators to direct liquid cooling?

The data center industry and other large power-consuming industries continue to feel pressure from skyrocketing electricity prices. In Germany and France, wholesale energy prices this August increased six-fold compared to prices from 2021. The US has fared better, but wholesale electricity prices have doubled this summer compared with last year’s prices. While leased data center […]

Data centers weather solar storms

Data centers weather solar storms

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 […]

Quantum Computing

Quantum computing is not a panacea yet

Quantum computing promises a revolution in scientific discovery. Quantum computing’s main advantage over digital computing is in quickly solving highly complex problems that require significant time or resources to process. Currently, solutions to many complex problems can be estimated using supercomputers or pools of servers over days or weeks. Other problems are so complex that […]

Vegetable oil promises a sustainable alternative to diesel

Vegetable oil promises a sustainable alternative to diesel

The thousands of gallons of diesel that data centers store on-site to fuel backup generators in the event of a grid outage are hard to ignore — and do little to assist operators’ drive toward tougher sustainability goals. In the past two years, an alternative to diesel made from renewable materials has found support among […]

Sustainability laws set to drive real change

Sustainability laws set to drive real change

Nearly 15 years ago – in 2008 – Uptime Institute presented a paper titled “The gathering storm.” The paper was about the inevitability of a struggle against climate change and how this might play out for the power-hungry data center and IT sector. The issues were explored in more detail in the 2020 Uptime Institute […]

Equipment shortages may ease soon — but not for good reasons

Equipment shortages may ease soon — but not for good reasons

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 […]

Extreme heat stress-tests European data centers – again

Extreme heat stress-tests European data centers – again

An extreme heat wave swept across much of Western Europe on July 18 and 19, hitting some of the largest metropolitan areas such as Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris — which are also global data center hubs with hundreds of megawatts of capacity each. In the London area, temperatures at Heathrow Airport surpassed 40°C / […]

Crypto data centers: The good, the bad and the electric

Crypto data centers: The good, the bad and the electric

A single tweet in May 2021 brought unprecedented public attention to a relatively unknown issue. Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that because of the large energy consumption associated with the use of Bitcoin, Tesla would no longer accept it as currency. Instead, Tesla would favor other cryptocurrencies that use less than 1% of Bitcoin’s energy […]

Direct liquid cooling (DLC): pressure is rising but constraints remain

Direct liquid cooling: pressure is rising but constraints remain

Direct liquid cooling (DLC) is a collection of techniques that removes heat by circulating a coolant to IT electronics. Even though the process is far more efficient than using air, the move to liquid cooling has been largely confined to select applications in high-performance computing to cool extreme high-density IT systems. There are a few […]

The ultimate liquid cooling: heat rejection into water

The ultimate liquid cooling: heat rejection into water

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 […]

Direct liquid cooling bubbles to the surface

Direct liquid cooling bubbles to the surface

Conditions will soon be ripe for widespread use of direct liquid cooling (DLC) — a collection of techniques that uses fluid to remove heat from IT electronics instead of air — and it may even become essential. Currently, air cooling is still dominant with DLC remaining a niche option — around 85% of enterprise IT […]

Bring on regulations for data center sustainability, say Europe and APAC

Bring on regulations for data center sustainability, say Europe and APAC

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?

Mixed resiliency at the edge

Mixed resiliency at the edge

Many analysts have forecast an explosion in demand for edge data centers. After a long, slow start, demand is beginning to build, with small, prefabricated and mostly remotely operated data centers ready to be deployed to support a varying array of applications.

Does the spread of direct liquid cooling make PUE less relevant?

Does the spread of direct liquid cooling make PUE less relevant?

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.

ASHRAE Guidelines

New ASHRAE guidelines challenge efficiency drive

Earlier in 2021, ASHRAE’s Technical Committee 9.9 published an update — the fifth edition — of its Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing Environments.

Eyeing an uptick in edge data center demand

Eyeing an uptick in edge data center demand

Data center end-user organizations and suppliers alike expect an uptick in edge data center demand in the near term.

Green tariff renewable energy purchases

Until recently, power purchase agreements (PPAs) and unbundled renewable energy certificates (RECs) were the primary means for data center operators or managers to procure renewable electricity and RECs for their operations. Many companies are not comfortable with the eight-to-20-year length and financial risks of a PPA. Unbundled RECs are an ongoing expense and do not […]

Datacenter fire frequency trends

Datacenter Fire Frequency

The catastrophic fire that occurred at OVHcloud’s SBG2 data center in Strasbourg, France (see last week’s blog about it) has led many operators to question their vulnerability to fires. Fires at data centers are a constant concern, but are rare. In almost all cases of data center fire, the source is quickly located, the equipment isolated, […]

Learning from the OVHcloud data center fire

The fire that destroyed a data center (and damaged others) at the OVHcloud facility in Strasbourg, France, on March 10-11, 2021, has raised a multitude of questions from concerned data center operators and customers around the world. Chief among these is, “What was the main cause, and could it have been prevented?” Fires at data […]

Network problems causing ever more outages

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 […]

Critical Infrastructrure Innovation in 2021

A Surge of Innovation

Data center operators (and enterprise IT) are generally cautious adopters of new technologies. Only a few (beyond hyperscale operators) try to gain a competitive advantage through their early use of technology. Rather, they have a strong preference toward technologies that are proven, reliable and well-supported. This reduces risks and costs, even if it means opportunities […]

Sustainability: More challenging, more transparent

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 […]

Edge Computing – The Next Frontier

One of the most widely anticipated trends in IT and infrastructure is significant new demand for edge computing, fueled by technologies such as 5G, IoT and AI. To date, net new demand for edge computing — processing, storing and integrating data close to where it is generated — has built slowly. As a result, some […]

Five Trends for 2021: accountability, automation, edge, sustainability, innovation

What we can expect for mission-critical digital infrastructure in 2021? Each autumn Uptime Institute, like many other organizations, puts together a list of some of the big trends and themes for the year ahead. This time, we have focused on five big trends that might not have been so obvious 12 months ago. Heading into […]

Rack Density is Rising

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 […]

COVID-19, air filtration and energy use

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused concerns about data center HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) filtration. So many data center operators are adjusting filtration protocols, including upgrading to finer MERV (minimum efficiency reporting value) 13 filters, to better filter out aerosols and COVID-19 virus carriers.1 But there is no free lunch. Depending on the design […]

Why ASHRAE is concerned about edge data centers

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 […]

Why data center operators are investing in more redundancy

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 […]

Increasing data center temperatures to reduce energy costs

Periodically we get questions about data center temperatures and energy savings. The questions usually ask about possible energy savings in commercial data centers by raising the temperature of the data hall. Some form of this question surfaces regularly over time because it just seems to be a common sense opportunity. But there is alot to […]

Data Centers and Thunder, Lightning, Wind and Rain

Data centers are built and sited to withstand all that Mother Nature can throw at them — or at least, is likely to throw at them — during their lifecycle. This has long been a given, practiced and understood by designers, planners and regulators. But climate change is changing everything. Recent weather events have led […]

Data Centers and Wildfires

As will be discussed in our upcoming note about managing data center with the severe weather caused by climate change, we continue to highlight the need for data center managers to not only review existing emergency plans but also anticipate previously unforeseen challenges. The need to understand the new ‘Normal’ Which brings us to wildfires… […]

Lithium-ion batteries in the Data Center: An ethical dimension?

One of the emerging trends in data centers is the use of lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries, both for distributed and centralized uninterruptible power supplies. Research by Uptime Institute and others predicts high levels of adoption in the years ahead. The primary reasons for this are technical, relating to energy density, rechargeability and management. But Li-ion […]

Which regions have the most energy efficient data centers?

When the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) metric for data centers was first agreed upon by the members of The Green Grid back in 2007, almost everyone in that crowded room in California agreed: This is not intended to be used as comparative metric across sites (as every situation is different) but it would be an […]

Certifying the Tier performance data center… Remotely? Yes!

Mitigating Risk Now with Remote Delivery of Tier Certifications COVID-19 has changed the way we go about our lives and how we approach our work. We found ourselves—almost overnight—not traveling, not going into an office, figuring out how to stay home most of the time while continuing to work, and wondering why a respiratory infection […]

Best-in-class data center provisioning: Simplify, Standardize, Repeat

Demand for IT capacity continues to grow rapidly across the globe, which has driven the need for more industrialized approaches to data center provisioning including construction and component assembly. Large operators and their partners have scrambled to apply new processes and disciplines, expand and re-organize supply chains, deploy prefabricated components, and, where possible, reduce cost […]

Micro data centers: An explosion in demand, in slow motion

A wave of new technologies, from 5G to the internet of things (IoT) to artificial intelligence (AI), means much more computing and much more data will be needed near the point of use. That means many more small data centers will be required. But there will be no sudden mass deployment, no single standout use […]

Data center energy use goes up and up and up

Energy use by data centers and IT will continue to rise, putting pressure on energy infrastructure and raising questions about carbon emissions. The drivers for more energy use are simply too great to be offset by efficiency gains. Drivers Demand for digital services has seen sustained, exceptional growth over the past few years — and […]

Data centers without diesel generators: The groundwork is being laid…

In 2012, Microsoft announced that it planned to eliminate engine generators at its big data center campus in Quincey, Oregon. Six years later the same group, with much the same aspirations, filed for permission to install 72 diesel generators, which have an expected life of at least a decade. This example illustrates clearly just how […]

Lithium Ion Batteries for the data center. Are they ready for production yet?

We are often asked for our thoughts about the use of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries in data center uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems. This is a relatively new, evolving technology, and there are still a lot of unknowns. In our business, the unknown makes us nervous and uneasy — as it should, because we are tasked […]

Free Air Cooling

Data Center Free Air Cooling Trends

With the recent expansion of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers’ (ASHRAE’s) acceptable data center operating temperature and humidity ranges — taken as an industry-standard best practice by many operators — the case for free air cooling has become much stronger. Free air cooling is an economical method of using low external […]

Open19-Rack Platform

Open19 expects 2019 to be the year of “Accelerated Adoption”

We have heard for a dozen years about the Open Computing Project (OCP) and their non-traditional approach to computing hardware, from the racks to the servers, storage and networking. And over the last few years to the Open19 Foundation started to promote their alternative platform which resembles the more traditional 19-inch rack approach we have […]

Climate Change changes all the norms

PG&E Turns Power Off (a.k.a. Climate Change and the Data Center)

In our October 2018 report, A mission-critical industry unprepared for climate change, Uptime Institute Intelligence urged data center operators and owners to plan for the effects of climate change. We specifically encouraged data center owners and operators to meet with government officials and utility executives to learn about local and regional disaster preparation and response plans. […]

Proposed NFPA 855 battery standard worries Data Center industry

A furious — but late — response to the National Fire Protection Association’s (NFPA’s) proposed standard 855, Standard for the Installation of Stationary Energy Storage, should put the whole data center industry on notice that it needs to increase its participation in standards development worldwide. This is not the first time professional bodies outside of […]

The Business Case for Smart Energy is Still in the Making

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 […]

Renewed Pressure for Renewables to Power the Data Center

In a recent presentation at the Energy Smart data center conference in Stockholm, Gary Cook, the Greenpeace activist who has tracked data center carbon emissions for a decade, showed a slide of logos, indicating companies that have made a commitment to use 100 percent renewable energy for their IT. Cook showed the commitment started with […]

For most, virtualization reduces data center capacity demand more than anything else

The public cloud is dampening demand for data center capacity and leading to closures, consolidation and a big rethink on data center ownership. Right? Not quite, according to the latest Uptime Intelligence research. In enterprise and colocation data centers, we found that virtualization helps free up data center capacity more than any other technology or […]

The Data Center Staffing and Skills Shortage is here NOW!

Sometimes it can be hard to get people to talk about their issues — other times, it can be hard to keep them quiet. A recent Uptime Institute Network member’s meeting began as an open discussion but was soon dominated by one issue: data center staffing. The members’ concerns reflect the growing disquiet in the […]

Comparing the severity of IT service outages: Uptime Institute’s Outage Severity Rating

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 […]

“Think Globally, Act Locally”: Re-Evaluating Data Center Resiliency in the Face of Climate Change

The 1970s-era environmental phrase “Think globally, act locally,” is an apt way for data center operators to consider the best approach to understand and address the effects of climate change on their facilities and IT operations TODAY. Globally, we all hear that climate change threatens to bring warmer temperatures, stronger storms, rising sea levels, and […]

NEXTDC: Obsessed with the details so our customers’ business is always available

This is a guest post written by Brett Ridley, Head of Central Operations and Facility Management for NEXTDC.NEXTDC is Australia’s leading independent data centre operator with a nationwide network of Uptime Institute certified Tier III and Tier IV facilities. NEXTDC provides enterprise-class colocation services to local and international organisations. If you are interested in participating in […]

Fiber Optic Cables in Data Center

Application Resiliency vs. Infrastructure Resiliency

Software enabled application resiliency is now playing a significant and increasing role in bolstering applications availability and reliability across the enterprise, reducing risk to the business. No longer are clients solely reliant upon the stability provided by the electrical and mechanical systems in their data center. By utilizing new software techniques, enterprises are now able […]

Myths and Misconceptions Regarding the Uptime Institute’s Tier Certification System

True or false? When it comes to Tier Certification, just ask Uptime Institute By Uptime Institute Staff Uptime Institute’s Tier Classification System for data centers has reached the two-decade mark. Since its creation in the mid-1990s, Tiers has evolved from a shared industry terminology into the global standard for third-party validation of data center critical […]

Luxembourg Colo Provides Multi-Tier Options

Luxconnect obtains different Tier Certifications to meet the needs of the changing market demands By Christine De Ridder LuxConnect, a multi-tenant, multi-tier data center and dark fiber network operator based in Luxembourg, developed an innovative strategy using Uptime Institute Tiers to differentiate the services and pricing it offers to key customer groups. In doing so, […]

Moscow State University Meets HPC Demands

HPC supercomputing and traditional enterprise IT facilities operate very differently By Andrey Brechalov In recent years, the need to solve complex problems in science, education, and industry, including the fields of meteorology, ecology, mining, engineering, and others, has added to the demand for high-performance computing (HPC). The result is the rapid development of HPC systems, […]

Economizers in Tier Certified Data Centers

Achieving the efficiency and cost savings benefits of economizers without compromising Tier level objectives By Keith Klesner In their efforts to achieve lower energy use and greater mechanical efficiency, data center owners and operators are increasingly willing to consider and try economizers. At the same time, many new vendor solutions are coming to market. In […]

Unipol Takes Space Planning to a New Level

Municipal requirements imposed difficult space considerations for Italian insurance company’s Tier IV data center By Andrea Ambrosi and Roberto Del Nero Space planning is often the key to a successful data center project. Organizing a facility into functional blocks is a fundamental way to limit interference between systems, reduce any problem related to power distribution, […]

Australian Colo Provider Achieves High Reliability Using Innovative Techniques

NEXTDC deploys new isolated parallel diesel rotary uninterruptible
 power supply systems and other innovative technologies By Jeffrey Van Zetten NEXTDC’s colocation data centers in Australia incorporate innovation in engineering design, equipment selection, commissioning, testing, and operation. This quality-first philosophy saw NEXTDC become one of 15 organizations globally to win a 2015 Brill Award for Efficient IT. […]

Switzerland’s First Tier IV Certified Facility Achieves Energy Efficiency

Telecommunications company Swisscom AG builds a new data center in Berne, one of seven Tier IV data centers in Europe By Beat Lauber, Urs Moell, and Rudolf Anker Swisscom AG, a Switzerland-based telecommunications company, recently built a new data center in Berne, Switzerland. Swisscom spent three years and invested around US$62.5 million to build a […]

LG CNS Deploys Custom Cooling  Approach in Korean Data Centers

IT services provider develops innovative cooling system for use in its own cloud computing data centers By Jong Wan Kim LG CNS is a major IT services and solutions provider in Korea. Since 1987, LG CNS has acted as the CIO for LG Group’s affiliates. As of the end of 2014, its data centers provided […]

U.S. Bank Upgrades Its Data Center Electrical Distribution

Open heart surgery on the data center: Switchgear replacement in a live facility By Mark Johns U.S. Bank emerged during the 1990s from mergers and acquisitions among several major regional banks in the West and Midwest. Since then, the company continued to grow through additional large acquisitions and mergers with more than 50 banks. Today, […]

A Look at Data Center Cooling Technologies

Sabey optimizes air-cooled data centers through containment By John Sasser The sole purpose of data center cooling technology is to maintain environmental conditions suitable for information technology equipment (ITE) operation. Achieving this goal requires removing the heat produced by the ITE and transferring that heat to some heat sink. In most data centers, the operators […]

Avoiding Data Center Construction Problems

Experience, teamwork, and third-party verification are keys to avoiding data center construction problems By Keith Klesner In 2014, Uptime Institute spoke to the common conflicts between data center owners and designers. In our paper, “Resolving Conflicts Between Data Center Owners and Designers” [The Uptime Institute Journal, Volume 3, p 111], we noted that both the […]

Improve Project Success Through Mission Critical Commissioning

Rigorous testing of data center components should be a continuous process By Ryan Orr, with Chris Brown and Ed Rafter Many data center owners and others commonly believe that commissioning takes place only in the last few days before the facility enters into operation. In reality, data center commissioning is a continuous process that, when […]

Case Study: Italy’s First Tier IV TCCF

System efficiency proves more important than equipment efficiency By Paolo Barberis, Leonardo Sergardi, and Ferdinando Ciardullo FastWeb is an Italian telecommunications operator, 100% owned by Swisscom, providing ultrabroadband services to the Italian consumer and corporate markets, in which it holds a 35% market share. Since its founding 15 years ago, FastWeb has invested in infrastructure. […]

Data center design goals and certification of proven achievement are not the same

On March 13, 2015, Data Center Knowledge published an article “ViaWest Accused of Misleading Customers in Las Vegas”. The following is excerpted from the article. ViaWest, the Shaw Communications-owned data center service provider, is being accused of misleading customers about reliability of its Las Vegas data center. Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt’s office has asked […]

Sun Life Plots Data Center Facilities and Operations Roadmap to Meet Application Demands

An imminent return of service causes a top-to-bottom examination of data center facilities and operations By Rocco Alonzi and Paolo Piro When Sun Life Financial completed a return of service for its data center operations in 2011, the Enterprise Infrastructure (IE) and Corporate Real Estate (CRE) teams immediately saw an opportunity to improve service stability, […]

Improving Performance in Ever-Changing Mission-Critical IT Infrastructures

CenturyLink incorporates lessons learned and best practices for high reliability and energy efficiency. By Alan Lachapelle CenturyLink Technology Solutions and its antecedents (Exodus, Cable and Wireless, Qwest, and Savvis) have a long tradition of building mission critical data centers. With the advent of its Internet Data Centers in the mid-1990s, Exodus broke new ground by […]

Operational Upgrade Helps Fuel Oil Exploration Surveyor

Petroleum Geo-Services increases its capabilities using innovative data center design By Rob Elder and Mike Turff Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS) is a leading oil exploration surveyor that helps oil companies find offshore oil and gas reserves. Its range of seismic and electromagnetic services, data acquisition, processing, reservoir analysis/interpretation, and multi-client library data all require PGS to […]

Thinking Ahead Can Prevent the Mid-Life Energy Crisis in Data Centers

Turning back the clock at Barclays Americas’ data centers By Jan van Halem and Frances Cabrera Barclays is a major global financial services provider engaged in personal banking, credit cards, corporate and investment banking, and wealth and investment management with an extensive international presence in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Barclays has two major […]

Close Coupled Cooling and Reliability

Achieving Concurrently Maintainable and Fault Tolerant cooling using various close coupled cooling technologies By Matt Mescall Early mainframe computers were cooled by water at the chip level. Then, as computing moved to the distributed server model, air replaced water. Typically, data centers included perimeter computer room air condition (CRAC) units to supply cold air to […]

Annual Data Center Industry Survey 2014

The fourth annual Uptime Institute Data Center Industry Survey provides an overview of global industry trends by surveying 1,000 data center operators and IT practitioners. Uptime Institute collected responses via email February through April 2014 and presented preliminary results in May 2014 at the 9th Uptime Institute Symposium: Empowering the Data Center Professional. To immediately […]

Cogeneration powers South Africa’s first Tier III Certified data center

MTN’s new facility makes use of Kyoto Wheel By Olu Soluade, Robin Sloan, Willem Weber, and Philip Young MTN’s new data center in Centurion, Johannesburg, South Africa, includes a 500-square-meter (m2) space to support MTN’s existing Pretoria Switch. MTN provides cellular telecommunications services, hosted data space, and operations offices via a network of regional switches. […]

Russia’s First Tier IV Certification of Design Documents

Next Step: Preparing for Facility Certification By Alexey Karpov Mordovia Republic-Technopark Mordovia Data Center (Technopark Data Center) is one of the most significant projects in Mordovia (see Figure 1). The facility is a mini-city that includes research organizations, industry facilities, business centers, exhibition centers, schools, a residential village, and service facilities. One of the key […]

TELUS SIDCs provide support to widespread Canadian network

TELUS SIDCs provide support to widespread Canadian network. SIDCs showcase best-in-class innovation and efficiency By Pete Hegarty TELUS built two Super Internet Data Center (SIDC) facilities as part of an initiative to help its customers reap the benefits of flexible, reliable, and secure IT and communication solutions. These SIDCs, located in Rimouski, Quebec, and Kamloops, […]

emert-cover-photo

Data Center Facility Owners See Modules as Efficient Way to Deploy Capital

Compass sets the course with new modular data center approach. The term modular has been used to describe a variety of approaches to data center design. Historically, the first commercially available modular design was a 2007 Sun Microsystems container-based product called the Black Box. Today, the term describes products that range from shipping containers and […]

Data-center-owners-v-designers

Resolving Conflicts between Data Center Owners and Designers

Improving communication between the enterprise and design engineers during a capital project For over 10 years, Uptime Institute has sought to improve the relationship between data center design engineers and data center owners. Yet, it is clear that issues remain. Uptime Institute’s uniquely unbiased position—it does not design, construct, commission, operate, or provision equipment to […]

Lessons Learned from the Tier Certification of an Operational Data Center

Telecom company Entel achieves first two Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility Awards in Chile Empresa Nacional de Telecomunicaciones S.A. (Entel) is the largest telecommunications company in Chile. The company reported US$3.03 billion in annual revenue in December 2012, and an EBITDA around 40%. In Chile, Entel holds a leading position in traditional data services, […]

ATD Perspectives From Mainframes to Modular Designs

The experiences of Christopher Johnston, Elie Siam, and Dennis Julian are very different. Yet, their experiences as Accredited Tier Designers (ATDs) all highlight the pace of change in the industry. Somehow, though, despite significant changes in how IT services are delivered and business practices affect design, the challenge of meeting reliability goals remains very much […]

ATD Interview: Elie Siam, Pierre Dammous & Partners

Industry Perspective: Three Accredited Tier Designers (ATDs) discuss 25 years of data center evolution The experiences of Christopher Johnston, Elie Siam, and Dennis Julian are very different. Yet, their experiences as Accredited Tier Designers (ATDs) all highlight the pace of change in the industry. Somehow, though, despite significant changes in how IT services are delivered […]

ATD Interview: Christopher Johnston, Syska Hennessy

Industry Perspective: Three Accredited Tier Designers discuss 25 years of data center evolution The experiences of Christopher Johnston, Elie Siam, and Dennis Julian are very different. Yet, their experiences as Accredited Tier Designers (ATDs) all highlight the pace of change in the industry. Somehow, though, despite significant changes in how IT services are delivered and […]

Fuel System Design and Reliability

Topology and operational sustainability considerations must drive fuel system design. When Superstorm Sandy hit the Northeastern U.S., some data center owners and operators discovered that they hadn’t considered and treated their fuel systems as part of a mission-critical system. In one highly publicized story, a data center operator in New York City was forced to use a […]

Accredited Tier Designer Profiles: Adel Rizk, Gerard Thibault and Michael Kalny

Three data center design professionals talk about their work and Uptime Institute’s ATD program. By Kevin Heslin, Uptime Institute Uptime Institute’s Accredited Tier Designer (ATD) program and its Tier Certification program have affected data center design around the world, raised standards for construction, and brought a new level of sophistication to facility owners, operators, and […]

Meeting Data Center Design Challenges in Santiago, Chile

Uptime Institute Accredited Tier Designers address particulates and seismic activity in the Chilean capitol. By Panagiotis Laziridis, ATD and Jan Carlos Sens, ATD The city of Santiago, Chile, is a challenging place to site a data center. It has a history of strong earthquakes, it is close to dozens of active volcanoes, and the nearby […]