The cloud model was designed to be simple and nimble. Simple and nimble doesn’t necessarily mean fit for purpose. Over the past decade, new layers of capability have been added to cloud to address its shortcomings. While this has created more…
The global data center industry describes its own sustainability performance as average, compared with other industries — and most think efforts are not substantially reducing environmental impacts.
The COVID-19 pandemic has stressed supply chains globally, resulting in higher prices and increased delivery times for many components. Shortages and delays are likely to persist into 2022 and beyond as demand for IT, and for new data center…
In recent years, the IT industry and trade press were abuzz about the end of Moore’s law (the expectation that the scale of integration for chips doubles about every two years), and what that means for IT buyers. IT buyers saw a slowdown of…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
Many analysts have forecast an explosion in demand for edge data centers. After a long, slow start, demand is beginning to build, with small, prefabricated and mostly remotely operated data centers ready to be deployed to support a varying array of…