Datacenter outages costing more, $1m+ failures now common
Datacenter operators worldwide are largely unprepared for sustainability requirements, despite the industry anticipating new regulations in many regions. Meanwhile, outages are becoming increasingly costly, and progress on energy efficiency is stuck., which condenses experiences of owners and operators of datacenters around the world, including some responsible for managing infrastructure at the world's largest IT organizations.
Sustainability is a rising concern that has rivaled resiliency among operators since 2020, according to Uptime Institute. But while 85 percent of respondents say they report their overall datacenter power use and 73 percent report efficiency metrics such as power usage effectiveness , only 37 percent say they collect data relating to carbon emissions, and only 39 percent of respondents currently report their water use.
Uptime Institute thus recommends that all operators should put plans in place to report all carbon emissions associated with their datacenters, regardless of whether there is an immediate legal requirement, and that water consumption data is also collected. Uptime Institute's data shows the number of outages is increasing globally year on year, but the frequency is not expanding as fast as the global datacenter footprint. In other words, the failure rate per unit of capacity is actually falling. The report states that for 2022, 60 percent of operators surveyed had an outage in the past three years, down from 69 percent in 2021 and 78 percent in 2020.