What does data center downtime cost your business?

What does data center downtime cost your business? Do you lose credibility, revenue, profits, or clients when your systems are down?

If your cost of downtime is low, don’t waste your time reading this post. It isn’t for you.

If your cost of downtime is lost credibility, lost revenues, lost profits, and/or lost clients, what can you do to reduce your risks?

Use the 80/20 principle. Power and cooling issues account for a majority of prolonged outages in your organization’s data center. You can reduce the risk of power outages with data center power redundancy: two utility feeds, two generators, two UPS systems feeding your critical systems. You can reduce the risks of cooling failures by employing two or more air conditioning systems to cool your equipment, along with two or more ways to remove hot air from your data center environment.

The problem is that building data center facilities with these features is extremely expensive. The capital costs of a 1500 foot data center can easily exceed $1 million. But a few select outsource data center facilities can solve downtime problems at prices comparable to your existing enterprise data center.

Compare outsource computer room facilities with the cost of operating your own. Look for data centers that have N+N (2N) redundancy. Many outsource facilities claim to have data center power redundancy and multiple cooling systems. Make sure you’re getting what you pay for.

Don’t overthink this. Thanks to the lower costs of telecom, It’s no longer about where your critical systems reside. It’s mostly a math problem. Compare the cost of downtime plus the costs of operating your existing computer room to outsource data center facilities. You may be surprised.

High availability data center facilities with 99.995% uptime or better can solve many downtime problems. Affordable colocation facilities (outsource data centers) can help you manage your costs while improving your data center uptime.

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.