It’s the bane of many an IT leader’s existence: downtime at a data center. Whether it’s by power failure, network problems, or software errors, downtime creates inconvenience for fellow employees and delays in service delivery.
There are ways to mitigate these concerns, though, and a lot of the techniques come down to advance planning and more acute oversight of the center itself. These strategies can help your data center run smoothly and even more efficiently.
Frequency of data center outages
A recent survey of global data centers by the Uptime Institute shows that 70% of center owners have had an outage, down from 78% in 2020. At the same time, 62% of those who reported an outage said it lead to costs over $100,000. That’s compared to 56% in 2020.
The impacts of outages include supply chain disruptions, which have been in the news of late. They can also be blamed for a loss of productivity. In another survey from LogicMonitor, 60% noted that an outage or brownout caused less productivity, while 33% noted that outages caused “reputation damage” to the company.
When an outage happens, leaders should find out the cause, clearly define how long it took place, check to see if it’s a chronic issue, and assess whether emergency plans worked or not.
Ensuring that interruptions are lessened
Those plans are crucial to making inevitable outages have less impact or minimal risk to a company’s data. Here are some ideas on how you can keep the data flowing for your company.
Emergency generators
This is a company investment, but it’s well worth it. Make sure you have the correct site selection for the safety of the system, and that you are testing and maintaining the emergency system often.
Uninterrupted power supplies
The right type of UPS will close the gap between generator startup and power loss. This is another solution that needs strong planning to make sure it works with the type of architecture your company employs.
Fuel supplies
Make sure the source of your data center fuel is reliable, and that those who provide it to you make delivery guarantees in case of emergency.
Training and evaluation
This one goes beyond the equipment it takes to safeguard data centers. Put in place a thorough and intensive emergency plan, and make it open-ended enough to evolve as new technologies and regulations are introduced.
AVASO can help your company with its data center through its Integration Centers. We can assess your data center, consult on capacity planning, migrate your legacy system to a standards-based architecture and offer managed services and support to ensure your computing meets the performance standards you want.
Find out more about what we can do at the data center computing link on our website.
