The Path to Availability: Four Steps to Eliminating Downtime in Cloud Generation Data Centers

Figure 1: The requirements of the cloud generation are more complex and difficult to meet than previous generation data centers. My colleague Jack Pouchet has been posing an interesting question lately: have data centers become so focused on driving down PUE that availability has been compromised as an unintended consequence? It certainly seems that high-profile data center outages are more common now than they were 10 years ago. Is PUE the culprit? First, let me clarify. Pouchet isn’t saying that high availability and low PUEs are mutually exclusive. His message is that in our quest to drive down PUE we’ve…