Knowledge heart outages are on the decline, and funding in on-site backup methods is the primary cause. That is the one-line takeaway from the most recent Uptime Institute examine of information heart outages.
Maintain studying for a deeper dive into knowledge heart outage traits this yr, in addition to an evaluation of what they imply for knowledge heart resilience and restoration planning.
Key Data Center Outage Developments
The important thing findings from the Uptime report embrace the next:
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The entire variety of outages per facility has decreased in comparison with earlier Uptime Institute stories. (In absolute numbers, outages have elevated, however that is as a result of there are extra knowledge facilities than there have been previously.)
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Fifty-five p.c of organizations reported having skilled a knowledge heart outage previously three years.
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Nonetheless, solely 27% of organizations that skilled an outage recognized it as “important, “critical” or “extreme.”
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Which means total, fewer than 15% of companies have been topic to a notable outage throughout the previous three years.
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The failure of energy and cooling methods was the commonest trigger of information heart outages, accounting for about 71percentt of all outages.
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Human errors contributed to about half of notable knowledge heart outages, with failure by employees to observe procedures topping the checklist of forms of human errors related to this development.
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Cyberattacks had been negligible as a trigger of information heart outages, accounting for a mere 1% of all such occasions. (It is essential to notice that the examine examined the causes of outages affecting knowledge heart amenities as a complete, not disruptions to particular person workloads. If it had achieved the latter, cyberattacks would in all probability have factored in way more prominently.)

Supply: Uptime Institute
Why Data Center Outages are Declining
The primary cause why knowledge heart outages are declining in frequency, in response to the Uptime analysis, is that firms have invested in redundancy methods for his or her amenities. A couple of-third of respondents reported having elevated energy and cooling system redundancy.
The Uptime Institute cites this knowledge to counsel that constructing redundancy into every knowledge heart – versus establishing a number of knowledge facilities and distributing workloads throughout them – is one of the simplest ways to enhance total uptime. It says this development flies within the face of “expectations that multi-site approaches will undermine costly, bodily website redundancy methods.”
That stated, a statistician (which I’m not, though I as soon as took an “Introduction to Statistics” course in faculty) may take situation with the implication {that a} correlation between larger charges of system redundancy and decrease outage frequencies interprets to causation. It isn’t truly crystal-clear that that is the case, and the Uptime analysis does not elaborate on this level.
Nor does it element how investments in multi-site methods have modified lately. It is believable that the typical variety of websites has additionally elevated, which may very well be a consider decrease outage charges.
Nonetheless, the indisputable fact is that extra firms are investing in redundancy, and there may be at the least a correlative relationship between this development and decreased outages.
Methods for Lowering Data Center Outages
On the entire, the report means that the next are profitable methods for growing knowledge heart availability and lowering the chance of outages as of 2024:
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Spend money on redundant energy and cooling methods (maintaining in thoughts the caveats mentioned within the previous part).
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Deploy superior resiliency options, corresponding to software program that mechanically strikes community site visitors and workloads throughout an outage. Uptime says this strategy “can scale back outage dangers and their related influence over time,” though it notes that there could also be a short lived enhance in outages as a result of it’d take time for firms to study the intricacies of the brand new software program.
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Do not concentrate on cybersecurity as a key technique for stopping knowledge heart outages. Defending particular person workloads is definitely essential, however the knowledge reveals that cyberattacks very hardly ever trigger total knowledge facilities to fail.
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Spend money on coaching for knowledge heart technicians, and/or automate processes utilizing autonomous instruments, to scale back the chance of outages attributable to human error.
Conclusion
No single survey of information heart outage traits can reveal all the things that companies ought to do to extend uptime. However the Uptime Institute’s knowledge is among the many most up-to-date and detailed data obtainable about what appears to trigger outages and the way firms can scale back their dangers, and the takeaways are clear: General outage charges are declining, plausibly due to elevated funding in redundancy – though human error stays a serious menace.