Risk is relative. For example, studies have shown that wearing seatbelts can reduce highway safety, while more padding on hockey and American football players can increase injuries. It's called the Peltzman Effect and it describes how humans change behavior when risk factors are reduced. They often act more recklessly and drive risk right back up.

The phenomenon is recognized by many economists, its effects have been studied in the field of medicine, and I'd argue it is at the root of an interesting trend in IT — namely the increasing cost of downtime despite our more reliable virtualized environments.

Downtime Costs Are Rising

A study by the Ponemon Institute , for example, found the average cost of data center outages rose from $505,502 in 2010 to $740,357 in 2016. And the maximum cost was up 81% over the same time period, reaching over $2.4 million.

There are a lot of factors represented in these figures. For example, productivity losses are higher because labor costs are, and missed business opportunities are worth more today than they were several years ago. Yet advancements like virtual machines (VMs) with their continuous mirroring and seamless backups have not slashed downtime costs to the degree many IT pros had once predicted.

Have we as IT professionals dropped our defensive stance because we believe too strongly in the power of VMs and other technologies to save us? There are some signs that we have. For all the talk of cyberattacks—well deserved as it is—they cause only 10% of downtime. Hardware failures, on the other hand, account for 40%, according to Network Computing. And the Ponemon research referenced above found simple UPS problems to be at the root of one-quarter of outages.

Of course, VMs alone are not to blame, but it's worth looking at how downtime costs can increase when businesses rely on high-availability, virtually partitioned servers.

3 VM-Related Reasons for the Trend

The problem with VMs generally boils down to an "all eggs in one basket" problem. Separate workloads that would previously have run on multiple physical servers are consolidated to one server. Mirroring, automatic failover, and backups are intended to reduce risk associated with this single point of failure, but when these tactics fall through or complicated issues cascade, the resulting downtime can be especially costly for several reasons.

1. Utilization rates are higher

Work by McKinsey & Company and Gartner both pegged utilization rates for non-virtualized servers in the 6% to 12% range. With VMs, however, utilization typically approaches 30% and often stretches far higher. These busy servers are processing more workloads so downtime impacts are multiplied.

2. More customers are affected

Internal and external customers are accustomed to using VMs to share physical servers, so outages now affect a greater variety of workloads. This expands business consequences. A co-location provider could easily face irate calls and emails from dozens of clients, and a corporate data center manager could see complaints rise from the help desk to the C suite.

3. Complexity is prolonging downtime

Virtualization projects were supposed to simplify data centers but many have not, according to CIO Magazine. In their survey, respondents said they experience an average of 16 outages per year, 11 of which were caused by system failure resulting from complexity. And more complex systems are more difficult to troubleshoot and repair, making for longer downtime and higher overall costs.

Read Part 2: Solutions for Minimizing Server Downtime