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? In a recent Uptime Institute survey of nearly 400 data center operators and suppliers w...
In the 2020 Uptime Institute Intelligence report The gathering storm: Climate change and data center resiliency, the author noted that, “While sustainability… features heavily in the marketing of many operators, the threat of extreme weather to conti...
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. However, its simplicity could limit its future rele...
The survey finds spending on data centers is growing; forecasting capacity is the largest operator challenge; and the use of lithium-ion batteries and other technologies is more common.
The COVID-19 pandemic stressed the supply chain for data center equipment and construction. Many expect shortages to persist, driven by the ongoing pandemic and additional challenges. In the event of future supply chain problems, what will data cente...
Photovoltaic (PV) solar — which has become the lowest-cost form of energy in most major countries, according to the International Energy Agency — is set to play an increasing role in limiting the environmental footprint of edge data centers. Although...
The bigger the outage, the greater the need for explanations and, most importantly, for taking steps to avoid a repeat. By any standards, the outage that affected Facebook on Monday, October 4th, was big. For more than six hours, Facebook and its oth...
Supply chain upheaval is one of the pandemic’s ripple effects, and the data center sector has not been spared. For most operators and vendors, supply logistics will remain a source of uncertainty for the near term. In Uptime Institute’s Global Data C...
Edge data centers need to be resilient to failures. This is commonly achieved by using redundant on-site infrastructure, possibly combined with software-based, distributed resiliency. Generators remain important, but batteries, solar panels and resil...
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 a...
Operators often say that data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software is a necessary evil. Modern facilities need centralized, real-time management and analytics, but DCIM is notoriously difficult to deploy. The software is also not easy to ...
Increasing demand for data center capacity is challenging operators to optimize their server footprint. What is the relative value of virtualization, software containers, public cloud, and IT upgrades to manage growth? What elements of data center in...
Earlier in 2021, ASHRAE’s Technical Committee 9.9 published an update — the fifth edition — of its Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing Environments. The update recommends important changes to data center thermal operating envelopes: the presence o...
Uptime Institute’s annual survey, now in its eleventh year, is the most comprehensive, longest-running study of its kind in the data center sector. The findings reveal significant growth but also increasing complexity and challenges for owners and op...
Most new technologies go through a hype cycle: A spark of interest and early investment is followed by a surge of hype, then a crash of expectations as reality sets in. Only over time and a period of work, absorption and adjustment does the technolog...
Jacqueline Davis
Douglas Donnellan
Andy Lawrence
Tomas Rahkonen
Intelligence Team
Daniel Bizo