Many data center operators and owners have seen the cost of outages increase this year. At the same time, these operators are working hard to improve the reliability of their IT infrastructures. These are some of the highlights of a survey just released by the Uptime Institute group.
The Uptime Institute conducts an annual data center survey. On September 14, the consortium of companies unveiled the 12th edition of its survey. The information it contains could be useful to IT freelancers considering or already working in this field.
As a reminder, this device is defined as the status of self-employed. A form of employment in which you can switch at any time, when you want. As such, freelancing is suitable for retirees who want to return to work, professionals wishing to retrain, etc.. In some cases, it is even possible to combine this type of activity with a permanent contract.
Few operators publish information on their carbon footprint
For the 2022 edition of its study, Uptime Institute solicited 800 data center operators. Information gathered by the research firm shows that among those surveyed:
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- Many do not always comply with environmental regulations ;
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- The majority reports on power usage efficiency (PUE) and overall data center energy consumption.
Many operators will soon be required to report their CO2 emissions, for example. But many are not ready to follow this rule . Among the organizations surveyed by Uptime Institute:
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- 39% disclose information about their water use. Compared to 2021, this percentage is down 12 points;
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- Just 37% collect and report carbon footprint data. This is up 4 points from 2021;
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- 63% indicated that they felt their region would require them to report environmental information by 2027.
The agency says that future requirements, standards and legislation will require operators to correct these deficiencies. They will also, it adds, require them to institute more rigorous sustainability reporting and monitoring methods for the future.
The root causes of the failures have been revealed
The study also reveals that opinions on the Cloud are divided. On the one hand, companies are a growing confidence regarding the use of this hosting method for key workloads. 74% of respondents in 2019 said they would not store these workloads in a public cloud. This year, that share has dropped to 11 points lower. On the other hand, respondents who said they have enough visibility into the service resiliency of a public cloud have increased. Their share now stands at 21 percent, seven points higher than three years ago. Uptime Institute noted that this improvement stems in part from:
[…] From a perception of greater visibility into operational resilience.
The research firm also revealed the most common drivers of critical outages in data centers. According to its survey, the first is power problems, mentioned by 42% of the panel. Then come the network problems (14 %).
The third cause is the computer system malfunctions and cooling failures (13% each).
According to a quarter of respondents, their last outage resulted in an expense of about $1 million. This includes both indirect and direct costs. In 2021, this proportion was 15%.