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Data Center Costs and Moore's Law

Ken Brill of the Uptime Institute cites "the economic breakdown of Moore's Law" as the primary threat to the data center industry.

Computerworld has an interview with Ken Brill, founder and executive director of The Uptime Institute Inc., which developed the tier system for rating data centers and is an important industry resource. The discussion focused on the cost of building and managing data centers, and Brill cites "the economic breakdown of Moore's Law" as the primary threat to the industry. Here's an excerpt from Brill:

"Historically, facilities costs have been 3% of IT's total budget, but the economic breakdown of Moore's Law means that facilities costs [including power consumption] are going to be climbing to 5%, 10% and higher. That will change the economics of IT. The business question becomes, Will IT get more money so the increasing portion of the budget that facilities represents doesn't crowd out other IT initiatives? Or will the increasing facilities [costs] result in curtailing other things?"

Brill says this will force a more critical buying process, with energy costs factored into the return on investment. He also said companies may need to be more conservative about the operational cost of "dead servers" that are underutilized but kept running.