What does downtime cost your company?

What does downtime cost your company?

Have you assigned a hard dollar cost an hour of data center downtime?

Is the loss of credibility with your prospects and customers more expensive than the hard dollars associated with an outage?

There are resources to help you determine your costs of data center downtime.  Dave Patterson of UC Berkeley A 2002 paper on estimating the cost of downtime, offering a simple, sensible approach to calculating your company’s costs.

Why is knowing your cost of downtime important?  These costs help you prioritize investment in infrastructure to avoid downtime.  Simply put, if downtime is not costly, there is no reason to spend the extra money on data center power redundancy to reduce or minimize system outages.

But the fact is that downtime is no longer acceptable, even in small companies.  How do companies avoid it?

One of the easiest ways to improve uptime is to house critical computer systems in a 99.995% uptime data center.  This level of uptime is what is often associated with Rated-4 data center facilities. The cost to build hardened data center facilities with redundant systems is high.  But the cost of leasing space in an outsource data center is affordable.  Do cloud computing offerings improve uptime?  Absolutely, when what’s “behind the cloud”  is often a 99.995% uptime data center.

Use affordable colocation as a strategy to improve 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.