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...
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,...
This advisory report aims to help operators of critical infrastructure facilities prepare for the impact of COVID-19. The steps discussed will also help operators develop strategies and procedures for future pandemics.
Fear of the coronavirus or confirmed exposure has caused about half (49%) of data center owners to increase the frequency of regular cleanings, according to a recent Uptime Institute flash survey. Even more (66%) have increased the frequency of sanit...
Highly efficient, large-scale data centers are being provisioned faster and more cheaply than ever, enabling a rapid build-out of IT and cloud capacity. This Uptime Institute report focuses on best practices and best-in-class provisioning. Which tech...
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 pand...
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 ...
Andy Lawrence
Intelligence Team