Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made a minor change to its private-cloud appliance, AWS Outposts, that could significantly impact resiliency. The cloud provider has enabled local access to cloud administration, removing the appliance’s reliance on the…
The US Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) issued multiple geomagnetic storm watches throughout August and September 2022. Geomagnetic storms occur when solar storms interact with the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field, risking disruption to…
When energy costs began to rise steeply in 2021, and precipitously in 2022, it was clear that some digital infrastructure providers would be able to absorb these costs, while others would be forced to pass these costs onto their customers — despite…
The European Commission’s (EC’s) proposed recast of its Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) sets out new and strict reporting requirements for data centers operating in the EU. If passed, data centers with 100 kilowatts or more total installed IT…
A serverless platform is an abstracted cloud computing service that executes a user’s code without the user needing to provision the underlying server or operating environment. The physical server, resources and operating environment used to execute…
The thousands of gallons of diesel that data centers store on-site to fuel backup generators in the event of a grid outage are hard to ignore — and do little to assist operators’ drive toward tougher sustainability goals.
The value, role and safety of nuclear power has strongly divided opinion, both in favor of and against, since the 1950s. This debate has now, in 2022, reached a critical point again as energy security and prices cause increasing concern globally (…
IT hardware vendors, such as Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), are pivoting their revenue models away from product sales toward service-based subscriptions. The objective is to make hardware appear more flexible and cloud-like, so buyers…
Quantum computing promises a revolution in scientific discovery. Quantum computing's main advantage over digital computing is in quickly solving highly complex problems that require significant time or resources to process. Currently, solutions to…
When Uptime Institute Intelligence surveyed data center infrastructure operators about supply chain issues in August 2021, more than two-thirds of respondents had experienced some shortages in the previous 18 months. Larger operations bore the brunt…
An extreme heat wave swept across much of Western Europe on July 18 and 19, hitting some of the largest metropolitan areas such as Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris — which are also global data center hubs with hundreds of megawatts of capacity…
Although big-name hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft dominate the cloud arena, other companies also believe they have a role to play. Vultr, OVHcloud, Linode, DigitalOcean, Bluehost and Scaleway, for example, don’t offer huge…
Nearly 15 years ago – in 2008 – Uptime Institute presented a paper titled “The gathering storm.” The paper was about the inevitability of a struggle against climate change and how this might play out for the power-hungry data center and IT sector.…
Chip designer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has successfully mounted a challenge to Intel’s dominance in data center processors by focusing on energy-efficient server chips. AMD plans to further expand its presence in data centers by bringing more…
A reliance on digital services since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 and governments’ increased concerns about the risks and resiliency of digital infrastructure have resulted in numerous new proposals for stricter legislation. If…