Data Center Overbuilding – Part 1 of 3

Here’s a compelling argument in favor of putting your IT infrastructure at a managed-services provider such as EasyStreet: The risk of wasting big dollars in capital and operating costs by overbuilding your own data center.

American Power Conversion (APC)—a Rhode Island-based major supplier of integrated critical power and cooling services—polled a number of its customers regarding their data center utilization and came up with some surprising findings.

Such as: Utilization of physical and power infrastructure in customer data centers is less than 50 percent. This gap is the result of anticipated loads versus actual loads. For example, APC found that, typically, power and cooling systems were completely built-out from Day One in data centers with design lives of 10 years. And the actual loads never came close to what had been anticipated.

A common assumption in these data centers was that start-up loads would be 30 percent of the eventual expected load. In fact, the actual start-up loads tended to be only 30 percent of what was anticipated for start-up. Likewise, the eventual actual load in these data centers amounted to only 30 percent of installed capacity.

What does it mean? “The average data center is ultimately oversized by three times in design value,” the survey report states. “At commissioning, the oversizing is even more dramatic, being typically on the order of 10 times.”

Stay tuned for Part 2, dealing with the wasted costs of overbuilding.