Data center spending is on the rise; forecasting capacity requirements remains a top challenge for operators; and data center infrastructure management and prefabricated data center components are now mainstream. These are some of the findings of the...
As discussed in Note #71 (In thunder, lightning, or in rain?), climate change requires data center managers to not only review existing emergency plans but also anticipate previously unforeseen challenges. For any organization, the health and safety ...
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...
As the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded, many people have suggested that the business case for enterprises to move more workloads to the public cloud has been strengthened. Some have argued that the pandemic will accelerate the decline of the enterpris...
Increasingly, data centers cannot find qualified candidates for open jobs. Companies that commit to diverse and inclusive workplaces are more likely to have better financial performance; greater innovation and productivity; and higher employee-ambass...
Data center managers, on both the facilities and the IT side of operations, are known for their preparedness. Even so, the pandemic caught most by surprise. Few had an effective pandemic plan in place, and most had to react and adapt on the fly, as b...
The COVID-19 pandemic will bring about some long-term strategic changes to the design, management and day-to-day operations of data centers and mission-critical infrastructure. Some changes would have happened anyway, but more slowly; others were les...
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....
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; ev...
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 physica...
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 becaus...
The tenth Uptime Institute annual survey is the largest and most comprehensive research study of its kind in the data center sector. The findings discussed in this report reveal what operators around the world are thinking, doing and planning in the ...
Demand for IT capacity continues to grow rapidly across the globe, which has driven the need for more industrialized approaches to data center construction and component assembly. Large operators and their partners have scrambled to apply new process...
Modern data centers are rarely dirty places, but even so, most are a lot cleaner now than they were before COVID-19 became a concern. A recent Uptime Institute survey, conducted in response to the pandemic, found that about two-thirds (68%) of data c...
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 Upti...
Andy Lawrence
Intelligence Team
Chris Brown