Findings from Uptime Institute’s recent survey highlight the growing, industry-wide need to achieve meaningful efficiency gains, evolve sustainability reporting practices, prevent costly outages and much more.
Uptime Institute has announced the release of its 12th Annual Global Data Center Survey. The findings show an industry that is growing, dynamic and increasingly resilient, but still working to address increasing pressure for sustainability progress and reporting, continuing staffing shortages, supply chain delays, costly outages and other complex challenges.
“The global digital infrastructure sector continues to enjoy strong growth and expansion, despite the many obstacles operators are facing today,” said Andy Lawrence, Executive Director of Research, Uptime Institute Intelligence. “We’ve seen the industry invest in increased resiliency and reliability, but there’s still work to be done when it comes to improving efficiency, environmental sustainability, outage prevention, staffing pipelines and more.”
Uptime’s annual Global Data Center Survey is the largest and most comprehensive in the digital infrastructure industry. It provides detailed insights into the digital critical infrastructure landscape and a sense of its future trajectory. Key findings from the 2022 report include:
- Many data centre operators are unprepared for mounting sustainability requirements and regulations –Most respondents say they report on overall data centre power use and PUE, but many still are not tracking critical environmental metrics. Although 63% of operators believe authorities in their region will require them to publicly report environmental data in the next five years, just 37% collect and report carbon emissions data (a slight increase over 33% in 2021) and only 39% currently report their water use (a 12% drop compared to 2021). New laws, standards and requirements will force operators to address these gaps and establish more stringent sustainability tracking and reporting practices in the coming years.
- More operators are investing to bolster data centre resiliency – Data centre owners and operators are making significant investments in the resiliency of their physical infrastructure, with about 40% of respondents reporting increased redundancy levels at their primary data centres in the past three to five years. Power and cooling systems have received similar attention, with a third of operators upgrading either or both.
- Outages are becoming more expensive and are still far too frequent – The share of all outages costing operators over US$ 1 million has reached 25%, a significant increase from 15% in 2021. In 2022, 60% of operators reported experiencing an outage (regardless of severity) in the past three years — down from 69% in 2021 and 78% in 2020. Although the data indicates a trend towards improved outage rates, the frequency of outages is still much too high and with more than two-thirds now costing operators upwards of US$100,000, the consequences are getting worse.
Uptime’s 2022 Global Data Center Survey also includes findings on industry attitudes towards nuclear energy, server refresh rates, rack density trends and more.
Last year’s study took place in H1 2022 and includes responses from around 800 data centre owners and operators responsible for managing infrastructure at the world’s largest IT organisations. It also includes insights from 700 data centre suppliers, designers and advisors worldwide.
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