Andy
Lawrence
Data center managers have gone to some lengths to avoid transmission of the COVID-19 virus in their facilities. Fortunately, many factors help keep transmission rates low in data centers: few staff are required; most jobs do not require close…
Andy Lawrence
Andy is a founding member and the Executive Director of Research for Uptime Institute Intelligence, which analyzes and explains trends shaping the critical infrastructure industry. He has extensive experience analyzing developments in IT, emerging technologies, data centers and infrastructure, and advising companies on technical and business strategies.
alawrence@uptimeinstitute.com
Latest Research
Humidity and COVID-19 in data centers
The pandemic, outages and the internet giants
In a recent analysis (Pandemic is causing some outages and slowdowns), we considered a question that Uptime Institute has been asked many times since COVID-19 lockdowns began: Has the pandemic caused any increase in outages? The question arose…
COVID-19: Critical impact and legacy
What will be the long-lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the digital critical infrastructure industry? It may be too soon to ask the question given that, at the time of writing, the virus is taking its toll at scale across the world. But…
Enterprises’ need for control and visibility still slows cloud adoption
During the current COVID-19 crisis, enterprise dependency on cloud platform providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform) and on software as a service (Salesforce, Zoom, Teams) has increased. Operators report booming demand…
COVID-19: What worries data center management most?
To date, the critical infrastructure industry has mostly managed effectively with reduced staff, deferred maintenance, social distancing and new patterns of demand. While there have been some serious incidents and outages directly related to the…
Pandemic is causing some outages and slowdowns
To date, media coverage of the impact of COVID-19 and the lockdowns has been largely laudatory. There have been few high profile or serious outages (perhaps fewer than normal) and for the most part, internet traffic flow analysis shows that a sudden…
Data center PUEs flat since 2013
The average power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio for a data center in 2020 is 1.58, only marginally better than 7 years ago, according to the latest annual Uptime Institute survey (findings to be published shortly).PUE, an international standard…
Are outages getting longer?
One of the findings of Uptime Institute’s recently published report Annual outage analysis 2020 is that the most serious categories of outages — those that cause a significant disruption in services — are becoming more severe and more costly. This…
The spectre of ransomware
Uptime Institute Intelligence plans to release its 2019/2020 outages report shortly. This report will examine the types, causes and impacts of public outages, as well as further analyze the results of a recent Uptime survey on outages and impacts…
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…
Annual outage analysis 2020
What are the main causes of outages? Which industries suffer most? Why? What is the impact? Uptime Institute presents and analyzes annualized outage data for 2016-2019, pinpointing trends, causes and impacts.
Outages drive authorities and businesses to act
Big IT outages are occurring with growing regularity, many with severe consequences. Executives, industry authorities and governments alike are responding with more rules, calls for more transparency and a more formal approach to end-to-end,…
Surveillance capitalism and DCIM
In her book “Surveillance Capitalism,” Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff describes how some software and service providers have been collecting vast amounts of data, with the goal of tracking, anticipating, shaping and even controlling the behavior of…
Data centers without generators: The groundwork is being laid
In 2012, Microsoft announced that it planned to eliminate engine generators at its big data center campus in Quincy, Washington. Six years later the same group, with much the same aspirations, filed for permission to install 72 diesel generators,…
99 Red flags
One of the most widely cited metrics in the IT industry is for availability, expressed in the form of a number of nines: three nines for 99.9% availability (minutes of downtime per year), extending to six nines — 99.9999% — or even, very rarely,…