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Data Center News Roundup: Survey Reveals Key Challenges, Vegetable Oil Powers Backup Generators
In this week’s top data center news, the Uptime Institute reveals key insights from its annual survey, and STT GDC fuels its green ambitions with hydrotreated vegetable oil.
James Walker
August 2, 2024
4 Min Read
Alamy
With data center news moving faster than ever, we want to make it easy for industry professionals to cut through the noise and find the most important stories of the week.
The Data Center Knowledge News Roundup brings you the latest news and developments across the data center industry – from investments and mergers to security threats and industry trends.
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Counting Costs
Offering a snapshot of an industry poised for significant transformation, the Uptime Institute this week released its 14th annual Global Data Center Survey.
Conducted in the first half of 2024, the survey provides insights into the practices and challenges faced by data center owners and operators worldwide.
In a significant shift from previous years, the report reveals that cost has emerged as the primary concern for digital infrastructure management.
“Certainly, if you go to some of the industry events and you see the amount of investment going into the sector and the amount of money that’s been spent, you wouldn’t think this is an industry that worries about costs,” said Andy Lawrence, executive director of research at Uptime Institute.
Other key findings include:
Industry average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) remains at 1.56 – flat for the fifth consecutive year
Only 41% of operators track water usage for sustainability purposes
33% of operators are developing new capacity to handle high-density cabinets
80% of operators believe recent downtime incidents were preventable
Check out our coverage of the report for all the details.
Class Act
The EU AI Act came into effect on August 1 as the world’s first and only set of binding requirements to mitigate AI risks. The goal is to enable institutions to exploit AI fully, in a safe, trustworthy, and inclusive manner.
Enforcement of the Act will start in six months. According to Forrester principal analyst Enza Iannopollo, organizations still have a lot of work to do.
“The EU AI Act is the first set of comprehensive and binding rules on AI… and as firms don’t have any pre-existing experience of complying with these type of rules, it adds complexity to the challenge,” she said this week.
“This is the time for organizations to map their AI projects, classify their AI systems, and risk assess their use cases. They also need to execute a compliance roadmap that is specific to the amount and combination of use cases they have.”
CrowdStrike Outage Update
With the dust slowly settling on the massive IT outage caused by a botched CrowdStrike security update last month, organizations have been counting the cost of the incident.
As reported by our partners at InformationWeek, cloud risk firm Parametrix estimates the outage caused a total of $5.4 billion in direct losses.
The healthcare sector took the biggest hit, with a $1.9 billion loss, while the banking industry suffered a $1.4 billion loss. Companies in each industry will likely average a loss of $43.6 million each, Parametrix said.
The massive IT outage that struck 8.5 million Microsoft operating systems led to significant global IT disruption, grounded airlines, and hit hospitals, TV stations, and financial markets hard.
Oil’s Well That Ends Well
And finally, ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC), one of Asia’s biggest data center operators, has announced the deployment of hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) to its facilities in Singapore.
Produced from waste fats and vegetable oils, HVO will be used as a renewable fuel at STT GDC’s Singapore data centers, replacing conventional diesel fuel for backup generators.
The operator, which recently received a $1.3 billion investment from a consortium of KKR & Company and Singtel, said it would start with an initial batch of 50,000 liters of HVO.
“The deployment of HVO in our operations is a significant step towards achieving our sustainability goals and supporting Singapore’s emissions targets,” said Lionel Yeo, CEO in Southeast Asia for STT GDC.
Other Great Reads on DCK This Week
Data Center Disaster Recovery: Essential Measures for Business Continuity. Data center disaster recovery is vital for business continuity. Learn essential strategies to protect against outages, human error, and cyber-attacks.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg Tout Their Vision for AI. At SIGGRAPH, Nvidia announces AI software advances to speed the development of generative AI applications while the two Silicon Valley leaders discuss their AI strategies, open source, personalized assistants and more.
Intel, Eyed for Billions in US Grants, Will Fire 15,000 Workers. The layoffs will affect more than 15% of the chipmaker’s workforce, Intel said.
Best Practices for Planning and Deploying Modular Data Centers. This guide details modular data center best practices to help optimize the way organizations acquire and use modular builds.
Roaring Into the Cloud: Malaysia’s Tech Tiger Leaps Ahead. Driven by hyperscale investments and strong colocation demand, Malaysia is emerging as Asia’s next data center hub, writes Kelvin Fong, managing director at EdgeConneX.
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