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, whi...
Separating production and nonproduction assets should be an operational requirement for most organizations. By definition, production assets support high-priority IT loads — servers that are critical to a business or business unit. In most organizati...
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, seve...
In the movie “Mary Poppins,” Mr. Banks sings that a British bank must be run with precision, and that “Tradition, discipline and rules must be the tools.” Otherwise, he warns, “Disorder! Chaos!” will ensue. One rule, introduced by the UK Financial C...
A previous Uptime Intelligence Note suggested that avoiding data center outages might be as simple as trying harder. The Note suggested that management failures are the main reason that enterprises continue to experience downtime incidents, even in f...
Why do some industries and organizations suffer more serious, high profile outages than others? In a recent Uptime Intelligence Note, we considered a June 2019 report issued by the US General Accounting Office (GAO) on the IT resiliency of US airline...
Maintaining and training staff on comprehensive, up-to-date procedures is a proven best way of reducing the likelihood of an outage and is key to restoring operations quickly afterward. This report examines the impact of outages and the relationship ...
According to many IT professionals, a very high percentage of data center failures are caused by human error. Some report numbers as high as 75%, but Uptime Institute generally reports about 70%. That assumption immediately raises an important questi...
Uptime Institute’s Annual outage analysis, published early this year, called attention to the persistent problem of IT service and data center outages. Coupled with our annual survey data on outages, the analysis explains, to a degree, why investment...
We recently discussed where enterprises are putting their workloads. In line with almost everyone’s research, Uptime has found a very strong move of workloads to the public cloud, much of which then ends up in running, wholly or in part, in colocatio...
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 o...
Are data centers getting more efficient? How are outages changing? Is rack density rising at last? What proportion of workloads run in the cloud? Which new architectures are being adopted? The results are in for the industry’s largest and most influe...
Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used in data centers to drive up efficiencies and drive down risks and costs. But it also creates new types of risks. This is one of the findings from Uptime Intelligence research report 25, Very smart data cente...
Avoiding 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...
This report analyzes the causes and impacts of publicly recorded IT service and data center outages from 2016-2018.
Andy Lawrence
Intelligence Team