- Average global power usage effectiveness (PUE) levels have remained flat for four years. Additional improvements in PUE levels will require significant investment.
- As more organizations opt for a hybrid approach to IT, the share of enterprise workloads that are run in corporate, on-premises facilities has fallen to below half for the first time and is expected to shrink further.
- Enterprise operators say data security is the biggest impediment to moving mission-critical workloads to the public cloud. Resiliency and transparency are lesser concerns.
- Server rack densities are climbing steadily, but slowly. Average rack densities are below 6 kilowatt (kW) per rack; most operators do not have any racks beyond 20 kW. This suggests the widespread use of direct liquid cooling is not imminent.
- Many operators only collect a limited amount of sustainability related data and will struggle to meet emerging sustainability reporting requirements, or in turn, the requirements of some customers and the public.
- Most operators believe acceptance of the use of artificial intelligence will grow in data centers, but operators are distrustful of its ability to make reliable operational decisions.
- More than half (55%) of operators reported they have had an outage at their site in the past three years, the lowest number yet recorded. This continues a trend of steady improvement.
- Power outages continue to be cited as the single biggest cause of outages.
- Uptime Intelligence data shows that approximately 8% of the data center workforce are women. In the US (if not all countries), this rate is below that of other male-dominated industries, such as mining and construction.
- Nearly two-thirds of operators have problems recruiting or retaining staff – however, this figure is not currently growing. The largest skill gaps are in operations, mechanical and electrical roles.