Uptime Institute, the organization most known for its four-tier system of rating data center reliability, is responding to critique of the system from many in the industry by creating a set of standards to be used in tandem with the tier classification system.
The organization plans to release the new Tier Standard: Operational Sustainability in July, according to a news release. Operational sustainability is what has been a major point made by critics of the Institute’s Tier Classification System, who say that level of electrical infrastructure redundancy alone does not determine the amount of likely downtime a facility may undergo. Another major factor is the way the facility is maintained and managed, which is one of the areas the new standard addresses.
“The highest level of redundancy in a data center can be defeated by human error, building conditions or a local or regional disaster,” Uptime Institute VP Julian Kudritzki said in a statement. “Of top concern are human errors which account for 70 percent of the reported outages in our database.”
Three fundamental elements of the new standard are management and operations, building characteristics and site location. It is based on the Institute’s analysis of its reporting database for data center downtime incidents. The standard will have three levels of operational sustainability: gold, silver and bronze. Used together with the Tier system, a facility may for example be classified as Tier III Gold, Tier II Silver, etc.
Besides research and development of data center design standards, the Institute – recently bought out by market research firm 451 Group – also provides data center management and engineering consulting services. 451 Group also owns another data center-related research organization called Tier1Research.
Related news: 451 Group buys Uptime Institute
Related analysis: Shades of tiers
Related feature: Data center design: one size does not fit all
Keywords: Uptime Institute, Tier Classification System, data center uptime, operational sustainability, downtime, 451 Group | |
