In 2018, Uptime Institute surveyed more than 1,100 data center operators and IT practitioners around the world and found that 31% had experienced an IT downtime incident or severe degradation of service in the past year. This is up from 25% in 2017! And if those numbers don’t concern you, then consider the cost of downtime. Out of those respondents that calculated their downtime losses, one third reported over $250,000, with 15% costing more than $1 million. The biggest single cause of failure: a loss of on-site power. [i]
The good (and bad) news is that many of these failures spurred by system or data center power outages could have been prevented. Here are some simple ways to ensure power losses do not turn into business losses for your company.
Harness N+1 power redundancy for maximum system availability
Though most businesses have access to redundant power levels (80% according to a recent AFCOM survey),many of them are not leveraging their full N+1 capabilities or using best practices to configure them properly.[ii] To accomplish this at Equinix, we provide N+1 uninterrupted power supply (UPS) power systems and dual power circuit feeds connected to two UPSs to our global data center customers. In order to take full advantage of this redundancy you should make sure you connect your equipment and/or your Power Distribution Units (PDUs) to both circuits.
Improve load management
Most businesses can also improve the way they manage power loads between redundant power feeds. We see many companies putting more than 50% load on one of the circuits, making it impossible for a single circuit to take on the full load in the event of a UPS or circuit failure. The best rule of thumb is to balance the load on each circuit so that if one fails, the other one can manage 100% of the power requirements.
Leverage dual power protection
As the industry’s largest global interconnection and data center provider, we are proud of our industry-leading track record of >99.9999% uptime in our 200 Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers. We incorporate innovation in our global IBX data center infrastructure designs to ensure the highest degree of security, reliability and efficiency. With a deep commitment to service excellence, we work closely with our customers to deploy best practices that keep their mission-critical systems up-and-running at all times.
If you are a current or future Equinix customer, we encourage you to take advantage of all the power distribution redundancy capabilities built into our IBX data centers. By fully leveraging an N+1 architecture and redundant power feeds, you can proactively safeguard your system availability, market reputation and the trust your employees, partners and customers place in you.
Learn how your company can achieve N+1 power redundancy and drive maximum system availability by contacting Equinix Global Sales.
[i] Uptime Institute, “Uptime Institute data shows outages are common, costly, and preventable,” 2018.
[ii] AFCOM State of the Data Center, 2018.
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