Uptime Survey: Colocation Data Centers Have Better Uptime

The Uptime Institute recently conducted a survey on data center outages reported in the last twelve months. The survey spanned across traditional enterprise data centers, colocation data centers and financial services companies with in-house data centers.

The survey was based on the number of critical data center outages experienced in the last year that impacted business continuity. Colocation data centers demonstrated high availability as only 3% of the respondents reported having five or more outages. 7% of enterprise data centers had more than five outages, and 6% of financial services data centers had outages.

Uptime should be the highest concern and determining factor when businesses select data centers. 21% of businesses reported to have faced at least one outage with their data center provider. However, a positive note was that most of the respondents surveyed reported to be satisfied with the overall performance of their data center providers. Satisfaction quotient ranged from very satisfied to somewhat satisfied.

Colocation contracts typically mention the downtime that is permissible. The survey reported the following trends for allowed downtime limits:

• 40% allowed for zero scheduled downtime.
• 30% allowed for one to twelve hours of yearly scheduled downtime.
• 6% allowed for thirteen to twenty-four hours of yearly scheduled downtime.
• 2% allowed for more than 96 hours of yearly scheduled downtime.

Another similar study conducted by the Ponemon Institute revealed that it costs, on average, $7,900 per minute for an unscheduled data center outage. This cost has risen by 41% as compared to the $5,600 per minute in 2010. Outage time was in the range of 60 to 90 minutes, making the average total cost of one incident in the range of $350,000 to $900,000. The survey also reported that sectors having critical operations such as defense, finance and telecommunications had higher downtime costs as compared to other sectors.

Lifeline Data Centers is a colocation data center in the Midwest providing 99.995% uptime and reliable data center services. As a Rated-4 data center, we have maintained 99.995% uptime in order to provide our clients with the best service possible. To learn more, contact us today.

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.