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 ...
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...
Regulation of Internet giants has focused so far mostly on data privacy, where concerns are relatively well understood by lawmakers and the general public. At the same time, the threat of antitrust action is growing. Congressional hearings in the US ...
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...
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...
In the recently published 2019 Uptime Institute supplier survey, participants told us they are witnessing higher than normal data center spending patterns. This is in line with general market trends, driven by the demand for data and digital services...
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 — ...
Uptime Institute has long argued that, although it may take many years, the long-term trend is toward a high level of automation in data centers, covering many functions that most managers currently would not trust to machines or outside programmers....
With decades of strong growth behind it and no slowdown in sight, the data center sector is struggling with staff shortages. According to Uptime Institute’s 2019 global survey of more than 1,000 IT and data center managers (UI Intelligence report 26)...
Today, the role that the physical data center plays in software-defined data centers, particularly facility design and operational management, is often overlooked. However, this is likely to change. As more networking and compute becomes virtualized ...
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...
Chris Brown
Intelligence Team
Andy Lawrence