Despite years of discussion, warnings and strict regulations in some countries, hot work remains a contentious issue in the data center industry. Hot work is the practice of working on energized electrical circuits (voltage limits differ regionally…
Uptime Institute Intelligence plans to release its 2019/2020 outages report shortly. This report will examine the types, causes and impacts of public outages, as well as further analyze the results of a recent Uptime survey on outages and impacts.…
As enterprises continue to move from a focus on capital expenditures to operating expenditures, more data center components will also be consumed on a pay-as-you-go, “as a service” basis.
A wave of new technologies, from 5G to the internet of things (IoT) to artificial intelligence (AI), means much more computing and much more data will be needed near the point of use. That means many more small data centers will be required. But…
Hardware refresh is the process of replacing older, less efficient servers with newer, more efficient ones with more compute capacity.However, there is a complication to the refresh cycle that is relatively recent: the slowing down of Moore’s law.…
Big IT outages are occurring with growing regularity, many with severe consequences. Executives, industry authorities and governments alike are responding with more rules, calls for more transparency and a more formal approach to end-to-end,…
Energy use by data centers and IT will continue to rise, putting pressure on energy infrastructure and raising questions about carbon emissions. The drivers for more energy use are simply too great to be offset by efficiency gains.
Data centers are no longer a niche or exotic investment among mainstream institutional buyers, which are swarming to the sector. There is now a buyer for almost every type of data center — including traditional-infrastructure investors and sovereign…
European officials have long eyed the rise of the big US cloud companies with suspicion and envy. Among their concerns is the European Union’s reliance on non-European providers of cloud computing and a need for ”data sovereignty,” or giving…
IT infrastructure — and the internet — has grown much, much bigger but not closer, or at least not close enough to support the anticipated wave of edge computing. Adoption of the internet of things, 5G and other edge applications is set to have a…
In her book “Surveillance Capitalism,” Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff describes how some software and service providers have been collecting vast amounts of data, with the goal of tracking, anticipating, shaping and even controlling the behavior of…
The full report Ten data center industry trends in 2020 is available to Uptime Intelligence subscribers here.
In 2012, Microsoft announced that it planned to eliminate engine generators at its big data center campus in Quincy, Washington. Six years later the same group, with much the same aspirations, filed for permission to install 72 diesel generators,…
We are often asked for our thoughts about the use of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries in data center uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems. This is a relatively new, evolving technology, and there are still a lot of unknowns. In our business…
Separating production and nonproduction assets should be an operational requirement for most organizations. By definition, production assets support high-priority IT loads — servers that are critical to a business or business unit. In most…