Posted: December 17, 2007

The rapidly-growing electricity requirements of data centers around the world threaten to cause a crisis for thousands of major corporations that depend on the instantaneous flow of digital information.

There are already problems in London and Dublin, where data centers are operating virtually at their peak capacity design level. Problems are starting to develop in Frankfurt and Munich. By 2011, according to a report by Gartner Inc., a technology advisory firm serving many of the world’s biggest companies, more than 70% of U.S. enterprise data centers will face “tangible disruptions.”

The problem is that, as the need for Internet-based communication continues to grow sharply, data centers everywhere are approaching the point where they have insufficient equipment and the floor space to house that equipment. New, more powerful equipment will require a lot of additional electricity, as will the cooling requirements of the additional floor space the new equipment will occupy.

“I’ve got clients who are really worried about this,” Rakesh L. Kumar, a UK-based Gartner vice president and the principal researcher on Gartner’s report, said in an interview. They are right to be worried, Kumar emphasized, noting that many major corporations will have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars per data center to expand their existing operations. It’s either that, Kumar said, or loose direct control over this vital corporate function by contracting with an outside data center.

Some companies may have no choice but to farm out some of their data operations. That’s because, in the wake of companies’ growing concerns about the reliability of grid-supplied electricity, there’s a backlog of orders for new generators that many companies plan to use to run their new equipment. Kumar said the backlog of orders is a global phenomenon, because of a massive data center build-out going on in China and India.

In short, Kumar indicated, unless a corporation has already placed its order, it may not be able to take delivery in time, leaving it at the mercy of outsourcing or unreliable power from the grid.

Kumar added that even companies that are prepared for the enormous amount of additional energy that their power centers will require still will be faced with energy bills that may be twice what they are today. “Many companies will face a serious cost issue” as well as a serious reliability issue, Kumar said.

Tomorrow, December 18, Part 2 – Companies that Benefit from the Data Center Power Crisis