If you wish to improve information heart uptime, it’s worthwhile to determine and mitigate the commonest sources of outages. This may be difficult as a result of there are many explanation why an information heart might go down, and it’s sometimes not possible to handle each single one. As an alternative, information heart operators should determine which uptime threats to prioritize.
To that finish, a brand new report from the Uptime Institute affords useful steering. The report particulars the commonest information heart uptime challenges as of 2024 and affords some stunning findings about which occasions set off information heart outages.
The Largest Threats to Data Center Uptime
You may suppose that the commonest trigger of knowledge heart downtime can be dangers like cyber-attacks or excessive climate, which are inclined to obtain quite a lot of consideration within the media every time they happen.
In actuality, although, these are negligible dangers from an information heart uptime perspective. The problems which can be on the coronary heart of most information heart failures fall into the next classes:
1. Bodily System Failures
The one most frequent purpose why information facilities fail is energy points. They account for a whopping 52% of all information heart outages, based on the Uptime Institute report.
An extra 19% of outages stem from information heart cooling issues, which the Institute categorizes individually from energy system points.
Because of this the most important uptime danger to information facilities, by far, is the failure of bodily programs. Knowledge heart operators who need to enhance uptime ought to put money into options like redundant vitality provides or HVAC programs.
2. Third-Occasion Supplier Challenges
The following most typical menace to information heart uptime is what the Uptime Institute categorizes as points with third-party suppliers. This implies failures brought on by service suppliers with whom corporations contract to handle information facilities by way of an outsourcing settlement or comparable association.
It is exhausting to say whether or not taking information heart operations in-house would mitigate this difficulty. It will appear to purpose that information heart outsourcing corporations, which concentrate on day-to-day information heart operations, are more likely to obtain higher uptime charges than companies for which information heart administration shouldn’t be a key focus. However your mileage on this entrance might range relying on how adept your in-house workers are (or aren’t) at managing information facilities.
At any price, this information level is a reminder that should you go for a third-party supplier to handle information heart operations, it’s best to ask about its uptime report to make sure the supplier doesn’t turn out to be the weakest hyperlink in your information heart availability technique.
3. IT Gear Failure
IT system {hardware} and software program failure is the third most typical supply of knowledge heart downtime – which isn’t stunning, since corporations have struggled with crashing servers for the reason that daybreak of the digital age.
There’s no magic bullet to mitigate this danger, however there are tried-and-true methods – equivalent to investing in higher monitoring and observability options and creating backup IT environments full with automated failover controls in order that if a server crashes, its workloads can transfer to a different server instantaneously.
4. Community Failures
Community failures are much like IT tools failures: They contribute to information heart downtime at nearly precisely the identical price, and they’re a sort of problem that companies have lengthy contended with.
As with rising IT tools uptime, methods for enhancing community reliability in information facilities embody higher community monitoring and constructing redundancy into networks in order that packets can take different routes if a part of your community goes down.
Making better use of software-defined networking may additionally enhance community reliability by making it simpler to determine and mitigate failures utilizing software program controls as an alternative of bodily networking tools.
Different Data Center Uptime Challenges
Fires and knowledge safety incidents additionally characteristic on the Uptime Institute’s rating of knowledge heart outage causes – however simply barely. They account for 3% and 1% of all outages, respectively.
In fact, this isn’t to say you shouldn’t trouble investing in fireplace mitigations and cybersecurity protections. However should you’re attempting to determine which varieties of information heart uptime dangers to prioritize, the information exhibits that these shouldn’t be the one actions in your listing.
