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Google and Microsoft, we need to talk…
Wed, 21st Aug 2013
FYI, this story is more than a year old

“Data Centers need to talk to each other more to avoid the sort of outages that have hit Google and Microsoft in recent weeks.”

So said Phil Turtle, CCO of Data Center Alliance, the not for profit industry body, following a spat of recent outages.

"The data center industry is relatively young, yet these outages demonstrate just how utterly dependent on it we all are for our business and personal lives," he adds.

"Currently the industry exhibits too many 'knowledge silos' and an unnecessary fear of working together with competitors to share 'best-practice.' Something mature industries find highly beneficial.

Turtle claims many data centers do not have the resources of a Google or a Microsoft, yet even with their massive technological resources these giants can have problems.

Commending more data center operators, service providers, and individual data center professionals to join the Data Center Alliance, Turtle is calling on companies to share experiences and expertise with their peers.

In unifying the industry, Turtle hopes to ensure the sector can learn from these outage events and share the knowledge for the benefit of data center customers and service-users globally.

Working together allows the pooling of resources to establish and codify best practice in Turtle's eyes - not only to avoid outages but also to increase power efficiency, and provide a level playing field to enable customers to properly compare data centers when they are searching.

“How reliable a data center is should be a ‘given’ and not a competitive edge,” says Turtle, in the midst of working all the above initiatives.

“There are many other factors on which to compete and the industry needs to share knowledge in the same way that other critical industries like nuclear and air-transport do - for the greater good.”

"We call on the whole industry to work together to reduce major outages for the good of the industry and the customers who rely so totally on us."

Should Data Centers need to talk to each other more to avoid similar outages in the future? Tell us your thoughts below