Maximizing Uptime: Best Practices and Proven Strategies

By Kelley Edwards, Vice President of Data Center Operations and Danny Allen, Vice President of Critical Infrastructure, DataBank

In today’s hyperconnected business environment, data center downtime isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a competitive threat that can cost enterprises millions in lost revenue, damaged reputation, regulatory penalties, and other negative consequences. When critical applications go offline, the ripple effects extend far beyond IT departments to impact customer experience, operational efficiency, and bottom-line results.

There’s a huge difference between good and exceptional uptime. For example, four nines of uptime (99.99%) may sound impressive and results in only 52 minutes of downtime per year. However, that’s not good enough. Five nines (99.999%)—DataBank’s target metric— reduces that amount down to just five minutes annually.

For enterprise organizations running critical workloads, one extra nine can mean the difference between meeting SLAs or facing costly penalties, or between maintaining positive customer relationships or losing business to competitors.

In this article, we’ll explore the essential strategies and best practices that leading data center operators use to achieve exceptional uptime and prevent costly outages.

The Three Pillars of Data Center Uptime Excellence

The old saying, “hope is not a strategy,” rings true. Achieving maximum uptime isn’t about luck or wishing for the best results. It requires a systematic approach, an extremely proactive mindset from all employees, and a passion to help customers win.

At DataBank, our approach to uptime is built on three foundational elements. Each one is critical to eliminating single points of failure and helping create highly reliable, highly resilient infrastructure for our clients.

• Customer infrastructure decisions: The foundation of uptime begins with the choices customers make in setting up their IT assets. We believe the most effective data center design works in partnership with each customer’s infrastructure decisions. For example, we encourage them to use dual-corded power configurations that can provide automatic failover capabilities when issues arise as opposed to single-corded setups can lead to potential vulnerabilities.
• Engineering design: Smart infrastructure design goes beyond industry minimums to build in multiple layers of protection. For example, DataBank uses N+2 cooling systems that essentially provide backup to backup systems. This helps us make sure each data center is always at the right temperature, even if something goes wrong. This commitment helped DataBank’s Universal Data Hall Design win a Golden Globee Award in 2024 for our ability to accommodate high-density computing demands while enabling fast deployments without facility retrofits.
• Operational excellence and maintenance: The most sophisticated infrastructure means nothing without disciplined operational processes to maintain it. This includes rigorous maintenance procedures, comprehensive staff training, and a culture that treats complacency as the enemy of uptime. Consistent execution of proven processes, backed by continuous improvement and the application of lessons learned to all data centers, transforms good infrastructure into exceptional reliability.

These three pillars create the framework for exceptional uptime, but they’re really just the starting point. Leading data center operators build upon this foundation with additional best practices that turn theoretical reliability into actual results.

Operational Best Practices: From Reactive to Proactive Management

While solid infrastructure provides the backbone of uptime, operational excellence transforms that capability into measurable results. The most reliable data centers distinguish themselves through disciplined processes that anticipate problems, learn from every incident, and continuously improve performance across their entire portfolio.

Avoiding Complacency: The Roulette Wheel Mentality

Complacency in data center operations is like betting on red at a roulette wheel. The first time you do it, your odds seem reasonable. However, if you keep betting on consecutive reds, your chances of continued success get cut in half with each spin.

It’s an important mindset in data centers. The more times employees do something—even regular tasks—the more overconfident they become. While each individual procedure might have the same risk level every time, the reality is that repeated exposure to risk virtually guarantees eventual failure.

This is why data center operators need to maintain rigorous adherence to procedures regardless of how many times they’ve been successfully completed. It’s important to treat each task with the same level of caution and attention to detail as if it were the first time.

Comprehensive Training to Reduce Human Error

Human error remains one of the leading causes of data center outages, making comprehensive training programs essential for maintaining uptime. Effective training goes beyond basic procedures to include scenario-based learning and regular refresher sessions.

Consider a fictitious scenario where technicians were required to split their time across multiple facilities, making it difficult to stay current on equipment-specific procedures at each location. A simple misunderstanding about controls at an unfamiliar site could have led to an outage. This type of incident highlights the importance of increasing staffing levels so technicians can focus on fewer sites and ensuring every team member receives consistent, up-to-date training on all equipment they might encounter.

Rigorous Post-Mortem Review Processes

When incidents occur, thorough root-cause analyses (RCAs) and post-mortem review (PMR) processes turn any setbacks into learning opportunities. Effective post-mortem processes also include detailed timelines, technical analysis, and clear accountability for implementing corrective measures.

These sessions bring together subject matter experts from across the organization to conduct detailed root cause analysis and identify specific action items. It’s important to remember that the goal isn’t to point the finger but to understand exactly what happened and why. Instead, the goal is to create new institutional knowledge that prevents similar issues in the future.

Applying Lessons Learned Across All Facilities

One of the most important parts of operational excellence is ensuring that lessons learned at one facility immediately benefit all locations. When an outage occurs at any site, staff should conduct detailed audits across their entire portfolio to identify similar vulnerabilities. While unpredictable incidents may occur once, internal teams need to do all they can to proactively make sure it doesn’t happen again in any facility.

Effectively applying lessons learned and new best practices depends on the use of standardized implementation procedures and comprehensive communications plans that address all vulnerabilities and questions. It also demands a culture where sharing information about problems is encouraged rather than discouraged, creating an environment where every facility benefits from the collective experience of the entire organization.

Comprehensive Event Reporting and Historical Analysis

Maintaining detailed records of both critical events and advisories provides valuable insights for predicting and preventing future issues. Critical events impact customers directly, while advisories represent potential problems that were caught and resolved before causing service disruption. By tracking these events over months, even years, operators can identify patterns and trends that might not be obvious from individual incidents.

This historical analysis helps predict future maintenance needs, identify equipment that may be approaching end-of-life, and recognize environmental factors that could contribute to potential problems. Regular reporting on these metrics also demonstrates continuous improvement efforts and helps prioritize infrastructure investments based on actual performance data rather than assumptions.

Cross-Departmental Collaboration: Unified Focus on Customer Success

One of the most impactful best practices involves breaking down silos between departments to create seamless collaboration focused on customer uptime. When data center operations, critical infrastructure, engineering, construction, and vendor management teams all share the same goal — customer success — and the results extend far beyond what any single department could achieve independently.

Successful collaboration requires shared accountability for customer outcomes rather than department-specific metrics. When everyone understands that customer uptime is the ultimate measure of success, teams naturally align their priorities. Regular cross-departmental meetings, shared protocols, and unified dashboards maintain this customer-focused culture while accelerating problem-solving through diverse expertise.

Building Unshakeable Infrastructure Through Continuous Excellence

Maximizing data center uptime requires more than advanced technology and redundant systems. It demands a culture of continuous improvement where every incident becomes a learning opportunity, and every team member takes ownership of customer success.

Organizations that master this combination of robust infrastructure design, disciplined operational processes, and collaborative culture don’t just achieve exceptional uptime. They build the foundation for long-term competitive advantage in today’s digital world.