Data Centers Devour 5 to 15 Percent of IT Budget

How much of your overall IT budget now gets eaten up by data center facilities costs, including energy costs? According to new research from the Uptime Institute, these costs have ballooned from a traditional level of one to three percent of IT's total budget to a new high of five to 15 percent.

That's enough "to threaten the economic productivity of enterprise IT," says Ken Brill, executive director of the Uptime Institute.

Many standard total cost of ownership (TCO) calculations around data centers fall short on both capital and operating expenses, underestimating factors such as power and cooling, according to the research.

In conjunction with the new research, the institute is offering a downloadable TCO calculator for IT execs. The tool, designed to examine long-term costs and possible tradeoffs, and the supporting research were done by Jonathan Koomey, PhD, a senior fellow of the Uptime Institute, and a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Project Scientist and Stanford University consulting professor.

This TCO tool focuses on data centers in the financial services industry; several other TCO tools will follow, the institute says.