Vendor lock-in is regularly levied as a criticism of cloud services. But the reality of IT is, there has always been lock-in. Even before cloud, enterprises were locked into hardware, operating systems, database platforms, data centers and network pr...
As major businesses feel a growing sense of urgency to dramatically cut carbon emissions, opinions are starting to shift in favor of nuclear power, which is not classed as clean, but is a near-zero carbon energy source. The digital infrastructure ind...
Control over critical digital infrastructure is increasingly in the hands of a small number of major providers. While a public cloud provides a flexible, stable and distributed IT environment, there are growing concerns around its use. These concerns...
In this report, Uptime Institute Intelligence looks beyond the obvious trends for 2022 and identifies some potentially challenging issues. These include sustainability reporting, supply chain problems and cloud concentration risk.
The findings of this survey suggest that data center operators are attentive to the growing risks from climate change and extreme weather events.
The data center and IT industry is a relatively minor — but nevertheless significant — contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The issue of wasteful digital infrastructure energy consumption is now high on many corporate agendas and is prompting com...
Air cooling dominates the modern data center, and in defiance of forecasts, direct liquid cooling (DLC) remains a niche technology. If DLC overcomes barriers to adoption, when can we expect it to overtake air cooling?
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...
Owen Rogers
Andy Lawrence
Intelligence Team
Daniel Bizo
Tomas Rahkonen
Jacqueline Davis
Douglas Donnellan