The frequency and severity of data center outages remain mainly unchanged from 2023 or show small improvements, according to the Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute.

"The need for resiliency is well understood by all data center operators and across the supply chain. Although advances in IT, and software-based distributed resiliency, have offered the potential for operators to de-emphasize site-level resiliency, this has not happened. The need to avoid outages at a site level and maintain IT service, despite the high cost, remains a critical issue for operators in 2024," the report executive summary states.

"Uptime expects distributed resiliency strategies to play an increasingly important role in mitigating the effects of outages in the coming years. With further investments in cloud-style application architecture and software-based approaches, these approaches will improve over time."

Uptime also suggest that resiliency can benefit from improved training, processes and greater management attention on the importance of availability. The survey found that 80& of data center operators believe their most recent significant downtime incidents would have been preventable with better management, processes, or configuration.

"This data highlights the need for more testing and training, and a continued re-examination of existing systems and processes. There is also an opportunity to learn from the experience of previous outages, and from the industry’s progress in adapting to an expanding risk landscape," the report adds.

Other key findings from the 2024 report include:

■ Enterprises continue to meet their IT needs with hybrid architectures. More than one half of workloads (55%) are now off-premises, continuing the gradual trend of recent years, and survey respondents expect that number to increase even more through 2026. Meanwhile, many continue to maintain their own data centers.

■ Most operators recognize the benefits of AI and its potential. But despite many operators planning to host the technology, trust in AI for use in data center operations has declined for the third year in a row.

■ Average server rack densities are increasing but remain below 8 kilowatts (kW). Most facilities do not have racks above 30kW, and those that do have only a few. This is expected to change in coming years.

■ Average PUE levels remain mostly flat for the fifth consecutive year, but this conceals advances in newer, larger facilities.

■ Staffing challenges have neither improved nor worsened from 2023. More effort is needed to expand labor pools and skillsets to match the pace of capacity growth.

■ Fewer than one half of data center owners and operators are tracking the metrics needed to assess their sustainability and/or meet pending regulatory requirements.

"Our data shows operators poised for major changes ahead on multiple levels," said Andy Lawrence, Executive Director of Research, Uptime Intelligence. "In 2024, we see the challenges of increased demand impacting power and cooling capabilities of existing facilities and the need for further investment to keep up with the demand. At the same time the industry needs to focus on continued staffing challenges to match capacity growth. And regulatory requirements are here and cannot be dismissed."

Methodology: Uptime conducted this year’s annual Global Data Center Survey online and by email in the first half of 2024. The survey participants represent a wide range of industry verticals in multiple countries. Responses were collected from a total of 879 end users registered for the survey and answered at least one question. More than one half are located in North America and Europe. Approximately one third of respondents work for professional IT/data center service providers (staff with operational or executive responsibilities for a third-party data center), such as those offering colocation, wholesale, software or cloud computing services.