SPECIAL FEATURE
UPS & POWER DISTRIBUTION
WHY COVID-19 IS PUTTING PRESSURE ON DATA CENTRE RESILIENCE AND HOW MODERN UPS DESIGNS CAN HELP As the world continues to grapple with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is no surprise that there is increased pressure for data centres to be immune to the risks of downtime, with testing playing a vital role in any future resilience strategy. Here, Kohler Uninterruptible Power explores what the pressures are for data centres, the importance of testing and how modern UPS designs can help.
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he events of recent months have demonstrated that the ability to operate secure systems is critical to the global economy. With UK-wide lockdowns being implemented as a key tactic in the fight against COVID-19, people are increasingly reliant on digital communications, whether because they are working from home, keeping in touch with family, spending time on social networking sites or turning to online shopping in a bid to fill their cupboards.
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Data centres are playing a vital role in this crisis – supporting missioncritical business and social activities, but also allowing governments and health professionals to store and share data which could play an important role in fighting the spread. While the growing focus on power resilience is increasingly evident, simply having the equipment in place is not enough. The pandemic is forcing data centre operators to invest in costly measures to make their systems more robust. In a survey by Uptime Institute, 4% of data centre respondents said they had a
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COVID-19-related outage and 10% had experienced a service slowdown that was COVID-19 related. Establishing the causes of these slowdowns or outages will probably not be easy. Research does show that staff shortage and tiredness can lead to more incidents and outages, and sustained staff shortages (due to illness, separation of shifts and self-isolation) are widespread across the sector. Slowdowns, meanwhile, are most likely to be the result of sudden changes in demand and overload, or an external third-party network problem. Two examples
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25/01/2021 10:44
