Data center managers and operators know the looming threat of unnecessary downtime well. Despite technological advances in the IT infrastructure space, they are a common phenomenon. The Ponemon Institute placed the cost of a minute of downtime in the data center at $5,600 in 2010 and at $7,900 in 2013. That has now risen to an average of over $8,000 per minute. For the Fortune 100, the loss of unplanned downtime costs as much as $2.5 billion annually.