The Uptime Institute has given its stamp of approval to design documents for two data centers in Durham, North Carolina, and Franklin, Tennessee, being built by Compass Datacenters. The designs received Tier III certification from Uptime, testifying that maintenance can be performed on elements of the infrastructure without risking downtime.

Chris Crosby, Compass CEO and one of the company’s co-founders, said this certification would become part of the company’s highly standardized data center product. “This is a core product offering,” he said.

Uptime issues Tier certifications to data center designs, but there is also a separate certification for data centers that have been constructed. Compass plans to go through that process once its first two data centers have been built.

Of all certified facilities in the US, Tier III is the most common among the four tiers. Crosby said this was the most appropriate tier for the clients Compass was targeting: customers that need mission-critical infrastructure deployment in the 1-3MW range.

This tier level fits in Compass’ business model financially, but is also the appropriate level of infrastructure redundancy for its clients.

Crosby said he was a convert from a person who used to disbelieve in the Tier system. The problem is many companies use Uptime’s terminology to describe their infrastructure without actually going through the certification process.

“There’s a lot of shenanigans in the industry,” Crosby said, commenting on misuses of the system. Many companies claim their facilities have a certain Tier level but “they can’t qualify for the standard, and it’s a sham.”

Compass is a newcomer to the wholesale data center market. The company has a standardized data center design it refers to as “Truly Modular”.

It is selling its product to “second-tier” data center markets in the US, where it claims there is substantial demand for data center space but not enough variety in the types of data center provider.

In September, Compass announced it had raised US$45m in debt to fund expansion.