Phil Turtle, the CCO of the Data Centre Alliance, the not for profit industry body, has spoken out against the unacceptability of the sort of outages that have hit Google and Microsoft in recent weeks.

“How reliable a data centre is should be a ‘given’ and not a competitive edge,” said Turtle, adding that data centres need to talk to each other more to avoid the sort of outages in the future.

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

“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.”

Many data centres do not have the resources of a Google or a Microsoft, yet, as we have seen, even with their massive technological resources these giants can have problems.

The Alliance recommends that data centre operators, service providers, and individual data centre professionals share their experiences and expertise with their peers and ensure that the entire industry can learn from these outage events and share the knowledge for the benefit of data centre customers and service-users globally.

Working together allows the pooling of resources to establish and codify best practice – not only to avoid outages but also to increase power efficiency, and provide reliable comparative measurements (a level playing field) that enables customers to properly compare data centres during the selection process.

All of these are initiatives on which the Data Centre Alliance (DCA) is currently working. Here in New Zealand The Cloud Computing Code of Practice, or CloudCode as it is known, is working towards a similar aim, by outline best-practice for cloud computing providers. Signatories to the CloudCode agree to make certain disclosures for their products and services.

When it comes to data centres, Turtle said, “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.