Andy
Lawrence
Across the globe, data center operators are under pressure to make data centers more sustainable. To this end, efforts are underway to reduce carbon emissions, water consumption and waste. The big, global and largely US-headquartered giants of the…
Andy Lawrence
Andy is a founding member and the Executive Director of Research for Uptime Institute Intelligence, which analyzes and explains trends shaping the critical infrastructure industry. He has extensive experience analyzing developments in IT, emerging technologies, data centers and infrastructure, and advising companies on technical and business strategies.
alawrence@uptimeinstitute.com
Latest Research
Climate change skepticism in the data center
Why ASHRAE is concerned about edge data centers
There are few organizations that have had as big an impact on data center design as ASHRAE — and specifically, their Technical Committee (TC) 9.9. ASHRAE’s 2004 publication Thermal guidelines for Data Processing Environments described the optimal…
PUE: The golden metric is looking rusty
When the PUE (power usage effectiveness) metric was first discussed at a meeting of The Green Grid in Santa Clara, back in 2007, a microphone stand was placed in each aisle of the auditorium. The importance of the initiative was understood…
The gathering storm: Climate change and data center resiliency
Extreme weather events have become significantly more common and more severe in recent years — a pattern likely to continue for many decades to come. This report discusses the implications for data center owners and operators.
How North American data center operators differ from those in other regions
It has long been said that enterprises in the US have a different attitude to their use of technology than their counterparts elsewhere. True or not, a recurring narrative is that the US is technologically more bold — more ambitious, more free…
Why data center operators are investing in more redundancy
When Uptime Institute recently asked over 300 data center managers how the pandemic would change their operations, one answer stood out: Two-thirds expect to increase the resiliency of their core data center(s) in the years ahead. Many said they…
Uptime Institute supply-side survey 2020
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…
Will the pandemic accelerate the move to public cloud?
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…
Pandemics: Operators plan to be ready next time
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…
Post-pandemic data centers
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…
Lithium-ion batteries: An ethical dimension?
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…
Which regions have the most energy efficient data centers?
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;…
Humidity and COVID-19 in data centers
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…
The pandemic, outages and the internet giants
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…
COVID-19: Critical impact and legacy
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…
