What Is Your Data Center IQ?

Do you know the number one root cause of a data center outage?

If you answered “UPS battery failure during a power outage,” you’d be correct. And more knowledgable than 75% of data center professionals who recently took the Data Center IQ Survey. The results of the survey have just been released by Emerson Network Power in conjunction with the Ponemon Institute, and is the latest report in the Data Center Benchmark Series.

data center“Our goal as an organization is to provide the industry with the tools, technology and knowledge to optimize data center performance, and this report supports that goal in a fun and interactive way,” said Dan Draper, marketing director, data center programs for Emerson Network Power in North America. “With the survey and the quiz we want to shed light on trends and best practices and help participants identify gaps in their knowledge. Working with the Ponemon Institute, we were able to benchmark industry knowledge of terms, practices and trends related to data center availability, productivity, risk management, speed-of-deployment, and cost management.”

On average, participants achieved 9.4 correct responses out of the 25 total knowledge questions. Only seven participants out of the 570 who took the quiz achieved a perfect score. Other results include:

  • Data center and facility managers scored the highest on the quiz, averaging 11 correct responses. IT management/operations professionals scored lowest with an average of seven correct responses.
  • Participants with data centers larger than 10,000 square feet scored better than those with smaller centers.
  • Participants in the 30-49 year age range scored better than those younger and older.
  • In terms of vertical industries, participants from the colocation sector scored the best, with an average score of 12, followed by cloud/hosting and financial services at 11.

The study was designed to determine the domain knowledge of data center personnel in the U.S., while also collecting data on application of best practices and current operating conditions within participants’ facilities. The survey report includes the results for 25 knowledge questions that comprise the quiz, as well as 12 operating practice questions. Results are presented by individual question as well aggregated by industry, data center size, and participants’ age range and functional role. All knowledge questions are multiple choice and run the gamut from simple, such as “what does PUE stand for,” to more complex, such as identifying the seven capabilities a DCIM tool must provide.

The quiz questions are based on basic information and reported research from a variety of industry sources, including the Uptime Institute, The Green Grid, Emerson Network Power’s Data Center User’s Group and IEEE. The full report, along with the condensed version of the quiz and prior reports in the Benchmark Series, is available online.

Today in other data center-related news, the Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation is holding its 5th Annual OCP U.S. Summit in San Jose, CA, where data center stakeholders gather to discuss developments to design, use, and enable mainstream delivery of efficient designs for scalable computing. Focused on the role of hardware, participating organizations include: Emerson Network Power, Intel, Panasonic, Samsung, Schneider Electric, Toshiba, and 3M. Facebook was a founding member of the OCP Foundation, to share its Prineville, OR facility designs.