The COVID-19 pandemic has caused concerns about data center HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) filtration. Many data center operators are adjusting filtration protocols, including upgrading to finer MERV (minimum efficiency reporting…
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…
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 even then…
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.
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…
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…
As discussed in Note #71 (In thunder, lightning, or in rain?), climate change requires data center managers to not only review existing emergency plans but also anticipate previously unforeseen challenges.
Data centers are built and sited to withstand all that Mother Nature can throw at them — or at least, is likely to throw at them — during their lifecycle. This has long been a given, practiced and understood by designers, planners and regulators.But…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The tenth Uptime Institute annual survey is the largest and most comprehensive research study of its kind in the data center sector.
During the current COVID-19 crisis, enterprise dependency on cloud platform providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform) and on software as a service (Salesforce, Zoom, Teams) has increased. Operators report booming demand…