If you are doing business in data center services and are not familiar with Uptime Institute’s Data Center benchmark rankings, then you are probably not ready to advise on data center infrastructure in the best way.
Their “Tier” standards serve to organize and classify the best data centers from the world’s major data centers, improved over the past 20 years. But what exactly are data center tiers and why are they so important?
What is Uptime Institute’s Tiered standard system?
Data center standards exist to evaluate the quality and reliability of a data center’s server hosting capabilities. The Uptime Institute uses a somewhat mysterious four-tiered rating system as a benchmark to determine data center reliability. This exclusive rating system starts with Tier I data centers, which are energy storage facilities, and ends with Tier IV data centers, which provide 2N redundant power and cooling along with guaranteed 99.99% uptime.
Tier III data centers are serviceable at the same time, allowing any planned maintenance of the power and cooling systems to occur without disrupting the operation of the servers and hardware located within. data center. In terms of redundancy, Tier III provides N+1 availability. Any unplanned activity such as operational errors or spontaneous failures of infrastructure components can still cause outages. In other words, Tier III is not completely fault tolerant. A Tier 4 data center is fault tolerant, allowing for any unplanned events to occur while still maintaining operations. Tier 4 infrastructure does not have single points of failure.
The basic characteristic is that a Tier 4 design requires twice the infrastructure of a Tier III design. Note that both Tier III and Tier 4 data center specifications require equipment to have dual power to allow maintenance of power distribution components between the UPS and the equipment.
Now you know a little about what the different data center standards are. Let’s dive into the details of the definition of Tiers in a data center:
What is a Tier I data center?
Requirements of Tier I data centers (Tier 1) commonly used by small businesses and organizations:
- 99.671% uptime
- Redundancy
- 28.8 hours of downtime per year
What is a Tier II data center?
The benefits of Tier II (Tier 2) infrastructure include:
- 99.749% uptime
- Partial power and cooling redundancy
- There can be 22 hours of downtime per year
What is a Tier III data center?
Tier III (Tier 3) data center specifications used by larger enterprises:
- 99.982% uptime (Tier 3 uptime)
- No more than 1.6 hours of downtime per year
- N+1 fault tolerance allows power outages of at least 72 hours to remain safe
What constitutes a Tier IV data center rating?
Tier IV (Tier 4) data center certification is often implemented in large corporations and meets the following criteria:
- 99.995% uptime per year (Tier 4 uptime)
- Fully redundant 2N+1 infrastructure (key difference between tier 3 and tier 4 data centers)
- Safely allow power outages of up to 96 hours
- 26.3 minutes of downtime annually
For one thing, Uptime Institute has decided not to fully publish the evaluation criteria for these different data center levels. Very few data centers have Tier certification from the Uptime Institute. There are only 38 facilities or design documents for facilities with official Tier certification at this time; These are primarily enterprise data centers. As a result, Uptime Institute’s definitions have been misused by the IT industry, causing confusion in many cases.
Data center infrastructure builders, designers and owners have tried to tweak the term a bit to give it their own unique flavor. Businesses should question any Tier IV conditions by data center service providers, as it can be difficult to get customers to pay the fees necessary to reap the benefits of their investment. Tier 4 data centers cost nearly twice as much as Tier III infrastructure. Tier I Research has established a two-tier data center quality rating system, with the following criteria. Data center Tier standards describe the design features of a specific infrastructure based on infrastructure design, capacity, functionality and operational sustainability.
Therefore, we classify data centers based on meeting Tier III data center standards.
However, in the summer of 2015, the Uptime Institute provided some more details on how they would rank next-generation data centers.
What changed in Uptime Institute’s Data Center Certification assessment in summer 2015
In July 2015, the Uptime Institute revised their data center standards in an effort to prevent some data centers from intentionally skewing their rankings.
The majority of data centers are Tier III rated, but with a little understanding, these rating documents can be used to demonstrate a data center that is designed to this Tier, but built Build and complete in another Tier.
This revision was made in response to increased scrutiny from industry groups, oversight mechanisms and regulatory agencies in North America regarding the validity of Tier Certification for design documents (Tier Certification). Certification of Design Documents) on the commercial market – Uptime Institute
What do the above mean?
Uptime Institute is addressing concerns that Tier Certification for design documents could be used to demonstrate a data center was designed in one Tier and fully built in another.
Essentially, if your data center is rated based solely on design, that data center will not be listed on the Uptime Institute website and therefore hopefully there won’t be any confusion about rankings of a particular data center too.
Which Tier standard does FPT Telecom’s data center meet?
FPT Telecom’s Data Center is certified to meet Tier III standards, including the design phase and construction phase.
Shown on Uptime Institute’s certification list, FPT Telecom Data Center ensures certification according to the latest conditions of Tier rating assessed by Uptime Institute.
See details at:
Introducing more about FPT Telecom’s Tier III Data Center
