This post will be the first in a series looking at some common concerns, issues and opportunities facing data centres from both an economic and an operational perspective.
We’ve all heard the expression “Time is Money”…well in the data centre industry we might re-phrase it a bit to: “Downtime is Money”.
A 2013 joint study by the Ponemon Institute along with Emerson Network Power, estimated that the average cost per minute of unplanned downtime in a data centre is a whopping $7,900! That’s up 41 percent from their estimate of $5,600 per minute done back in 2010. Data centres now support ever more critical IT systems along with highly interdependent devices which in turn make any unnecessary downtime even more expensive.
Numerous studies have been done on the impact of these unplanned outages and one such study estimated that up to 93% of enterprises that suffered from data center downtime of longer than 10 days, ended up filing for bankruptcy within a year of the outage.
The Emerson Network Power study done in collaboration with the Ponemon Institute {mentioned above} analyzed 67 U.S. data centres across varying industry segments. The sites they selected each had a minimum size of 2,500 square feet. The study involved looking at measuring the damage to mission-critical data as well as damage to equipment. They also factored in the impact of downtime on organizational productivity as well as regulatory/legal repercussions and even lost confidence and trust among key stakeholders.
Their infographic {below} provides a great visual summary and is self-explanatory of the key findings from their study. We found it highly valuable and hope you will too.
Credit: The above infographic was sourced from Emerson Network Power and the Ponemon Institute