Risks of Data Center Downtime

Most IT organizations as well as other corporations use data centers because of the flexibility and reduced stress on capital resources. But the primary reason businesses use data centers is the risks associated with data center downtime. The focus should be on minimizing downtime first, then performing your recovery procedures as quickly and efficiently as possible to reduce data center downtime to the bare minimum.

A recent industrial survey by Emerson Network Power has thrown some light into the high costs of data center downtime that businesses may have to incur. Reports say that for a medium sized company, the combined loss of revenue, credibility and clients may be in the range of $5000 per minute of downtime. An outage of 10 hours means you will lose close to $30 million on an average. This risk is carried by any company that depends on their computer systems to conduct business . In addition to monetary loss, the company may lose its reputation due to delays in service because of the outage.

The key to overcome this daunting loss lies is to first solve the power and cooling problems, then identifying the resources that need to be pushed back into service at the earliest so that critical business services can resume as quickly as possible. The disaster recovery team should have a reliable and tested set of plans in hand to speed up the restoration process. Every second counts and hence there is no room for errors. The appropriate recovery sites, equipment and infrastructure whether hardware or software, reference documents, journals, quick guides, etc. should be made available to the technicians at the earliest.

What do you think is your recovery time in case of a data center outage? Are you prepared?

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.