Uptime Survey: Enterprise Data Centers Carry Two-Thirds of IT Workload

With all the buzz about data center load going to the cloud or to colocation sites, it may come as a surprise that the percentage of data center workloads residing in enterprise-owned and -operated data centers has remained stable at 65 percent since 2014, according to the 2017 Uptime Institute Data Center Industry Survey. That survey found that 22 percent of the load was in colos or multi-tenant data centers, with 13 percent deployed in the cloud.

The takeaway is that with the explosive growth in business critical applications and data, enterprises continue to see the data center as not just important, but essential to their their digital-centric strategies.

Other survey highlights:

• Data center budgets strong in 2017. Compared to 2016, nearly 75 percent of companies’ data center budgets have increased or stayed consistent this year.
• Data center redundancy remains important, even as IT resilience is growing. The majority of companies (68 percent) rely on IT-based resiliency: Using an IT architecture with multiple, geographically distributed data centers, IT resilience relies on live application failover in the event of an outage. But the use of IT resilience hasn’t replaced redundancy strategies for data center facility infrastructure: 73 percent of respondents said they are not deploying lower redundancy physical data center sites despite increased adoption of IT-based resilience.
• Downtime matters. More than 90 percent of respondents believe their corporate management is more concerned about outages now than they were just a year ago
• Metrics and business. While 90 percent of organizations conduct root cause analysis of any IT outage, only 60 percent report that they measure the cost of downtime as a business metric.
• Sixty percent of enterprise server IT footprints are shrinking. The reasons: better processor performance, virtualization, and the move to the cloud. Sixty seven percent of organizations see workload that would once have been handled by their own data centers being deployed in the cloud.
• Forty-five percent of facility teams reported that they are doing facility infrastructure work, either upgrades or equipment replacement.
• Roughly a quarter of respondents said they had experienced an outage in the past 12 months; members of the Uptime Institute Network had half as many instances.
• Only 11 percent of respondents have experienced a data center fire; accidental fire-suppression discharges happen three times as often.

This Quick Read was submitted by Edward Sullivan, editor of Building Operating Management magazine, edward.sullivan@tradepress.com. Click here to read more about data centers on Facilitiesnet.com.

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