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Complacency Kills Uptime in Virtualized Environments

Chris Adams

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

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For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Complacency Kills Uptime in Virtualized Environments

Chris Adams

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

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...