In the movie “Mary Poppins,” Mr. Banks sings that a British bank must be run with precision, and that “Tradition, discipline and rules must be the tools.” Otherwise, he warns, “Disorder! Chaos!” will ensue.
A previous Uptime Intelligence Note suggested that avoiding data center outages might be as simple as trying harder. The Note suggested that management failures are the main reason that enterprises continue to experience downtime incidents, even in…
Why do some industries and organizations suffer more serious, high profile outages than others?In a recent Uptime Intelligence Note, we considered a June 2019 report issued by the US General Accounting Office (GAO) on the IT resiliency of US…
Maintaining and training staff on comprehensive, up-to-date procedures is a proven best way of reducing the likelihood of an outage and is key to restoring operations quickly afterward.
According to many IT professionals, a very high percentage of data center failures are caused by human error. Some report numbers as high as 75%, but Uptime Institute generally reports about 70%. That assumption immediately raises an important…
The best-run data centers are those where managers have access to meaningful information about their facility’s assets and operational status. This report details the questions they need to ask when purchasing DCIM software.
Uptime Institute’s Annual outage analysis, published early this year, called attention to the persistent problem of IT service and data center outages. Coupled with our annual survey data on outages, the analysis explains, to a degree, why…
We recently discussed where enterprises are putting their workloads. In line with almost everyone’s research, Uptime has found a very strong move of workloads to the public cloud, much of which then ends up in running, wholly or in part, in…
In our October 2018 report, A mission-critical industry unprepared for climate change, Uptime Institute Intelligence urged data center operators and owners to plan for the effects of climate change. We specifically encouraged data center owners and…
An Uptime Institute Network member and a battery vendor wanted to know: Can you have lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries in a Tier IV-Certified data center? The member noted Li-ion fires are very difficult to extinguish, citing the FM Global…
A furious — but late — response to the National Fire Protection Association’s (NFPA’s) proposed standard 855, Standard for the Installation of Stationary Energy Storage, should put the whole data center industry on notice that it needs to increase…
Are data centers getting more efficient? How are outages changing? Is rack density rising at last? What proportion of workloads run in the cloud? Which new architectures are being adopted? The results are in for the industry’s largest and most…
Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used in data centers to drive up efficiencies and drive down risks and costs. But it also creates new types of risks. This is one of the findings from Uptime Intelligence research report 25, Very smart data…
Avoiding outages is a big concern for any operator or service provider, especially one providing a business-critical service. But when an outage does occur, the business impact can vary from “barely noticeable” to “huge and expensive.” …
This report analyzes the causes and impacts of publicly recorded IT service and data center outages from 2016-2018.