Network connectivity issues become the leading cause of data center downtimes

According to the Uptime Institute, network problems are bypassing power problems in the top-ranking data center outages rankings as enterprises strive to move more of their workloads to the cloud.

The third annual data center outage analysis attempts to shed light on the frequency and causes of server farm downtime over the past 12 months. The report claims that the failure rate appears to have dropped markedly, citing the coronavirus pandemic as one factor.

A direct consequence of the quarantine and stay-at-home restrictions imposed by governments due to the pandemic is that many companies have temporarily shut down or scaled back their operations, possibly resulting in fewer data center outages.

In addition, in line with the Uptime Institute's guidelines for data center operators released at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, many firms have also decided to postpone their data center maintenance and modernization projects, which tend to be a source of disruption.

Looking at global enterprise-class IT infrastructure more broadly (including private data centers, colocations, and public clouds), the Uptime Institute's annual survey provides a consistent picture over the years: power problems are invariably the single biggest cause of outages.

However, the Uptime Institute now expects more outages to be caused by network and software / IT problems, and less by power problems. This is partly due to the fact that the frequency of failures related to power supply is steadily decreasing, as operators take measures to improve the infrastructure of their facilities and train personnel to take preventive measures against such incidents.

At the same time, network outages are becoming more common due to the widespread shift in recent years from disparate IT services running on specialized hardware to a model where IT systems are distributed and replicated across multiple sites linked between network connections.

Corporate data centers are typically operated by one or two telecom providers, but companies are increasingly looking to ditch such facilities in favor of colocation or public clouds to handle their workloads, so the risk of network problems harming their operations is increasing.