What’s The Real Cost of Data Center Downtime?

Ever experienced that sinking feeling when you check in on your 401k only to find that it’s been slowly hemorrhaging your future away for the past six months? Financial advisors will, of course, tell you to hold tight, play the long game and wait out the ups and downs. That’s a good strategy when you’ve got years until retirement, but it’s not a particularly helpful approach when you’re running a data center.

The financial drain caused by downtime can’t be waited out or recovered later. It’s real, it’s happening now and it’s expensive. How expensive? Citing a Ponemon Institute study, ZDNet’s David Chernicoff says the tab for unplanned downtime averages $7,900 a minute or as much as $474,000 an hour. Extrapolate that out and it only takes a little over two hours to negatively impact business by a million dollars. Needless to say, anything less than 100 percent uptime from day one is unacceptable.

Server Technology’s customers understand that 100 percent uptime is a realistic goal, thanks to products such as our PRO2 product family. Featuring hot-swappable, redundantly powered network cards, PRO2 PDUs come in smart and switched versions with both high-density outlets and alternating phase technology. The firmware in PRO2 allows for much more configuration and customization than other PDUs, and it does so with a super clean, easy to use interface.

Our PRO2 PDUs are even more powerful when combined with our Sentry Power Manager software, which offers data center managers the right tools to make decisions leading to maximal uptime. SPM is a cost-effective way to bring together disparate measurement points to improve efficiency and analyze capacity.