New white paper suggests up to $70bn of data center investment has been wasted

Future Facilities has released a new white paper entitled “Billion Dollar drain: the true costs of lost capacity in the data center.” The new white paper suggests that up to a third of global investment in data center space is being wasted at present through management without the appropriate tool sets to maximise capacity and performance.

30% of global data center space would equate to approximately 31 million square feet or 14 Empire State Buildings.

“Data centers are designed and built to provide a predetermined amount of compute capacity over an operational life of more than a decade” said Hassan Moezzi, CEO, Future Facilities. “However, the IT equipment that resides in each facility is typically installed over time on a project by project basis. It is this staggered deployment that leads to capacity being lost”. Capacity loss can occur when equipment is deployed without first assessing the impact of that move or addition upon the cooling supply. The net effect of such decisions is stranded, or lost capacity.

In many organisations, the problems are compounded by those responsible for signing off the budgets for data center related investments having scant idea of the gaps between the capacity they think they’ve paid for, compared with what is actually available for use. Even if aware of the problem, many senior executives are unaware of the correct tools to resolve this and are left believing there is no choice but to fast track new developments at still greater cost.

The problems this causes are cumulative and often only begin to show once a data center is at 50% of its design capacity. By this time it may be too late to fully eliminate the potential losses. Lost data center capacity can also create strategic risks to organisations as it can hinder the roll out of revenue-producing or cost-saving products and services.

Mr Moezzi added “Data centers are complex systems in which IT and physical infrastructure equipment function together to create the whole. Each individual change can have a knock-on effect which can cause a loss of space, power or cooling capacity. Ultimately this will reduce the operational life of the data center or require additional and unbudgeted capital expenditure to correct. The only way to prevent this loss of capacity is through simulation. Without these tools operators are making decisions today that can create expensive, yet preventable, problems in the future.”