Data Centers and the Risk of Power Outages

While exact figures may vary, when it comes to assessing the cost of data center power outages, the news is anything but positive. A recent Ponemon Institute study of 41 U.S. data centers placed the price tag at more than $11,000 per minute for enterprises whose data center is core to the business, such as e-commerce companies.
Perhaps more daunting is the fact that data center outages aren’t just costly, they’re common, according to findings of the Ponemon study. Among the report’s other key findings:
- 95 percent of respondents said they had experienced one or more unplanned outages in the past 24 months
- Complete blackouts occurred an average of once a year, while device-level outages occurred every two months
- The average length of data center downtime was 90 minutes, resulting in an average cost per incident of more than $1 million
Eaton’s Blackout Tracker Annual Report for 2014