The Uptime Institute has given Fortune’s data center in San Jose, California, a “stamp of approval” for management and operations practices used at the facility.

The Institute’s Management and Operations (M&O) Stamp of Approval serves to give data center operators third-party validation that their practices for minimizing human error in data center operations meet the Institute’s standards. Human error, according to Uptime, is the leading cause of data center downtime.

Fortune CEO John Sheputis said Uptime staff used company-specific assessment methods in examining the operator’s processes.

“The assessment methods were tailored to meet our business objectives and use our systems and controls,” Sheputis said. “The Uptime approach balances the need to measure operating performance as well as foster improvement.”

Fortune claims its San Jose data center has not had a single service outage since it came online in 2009. The data center’s total IT power capacity is 16MW. The company said the first 8MW phase has been fully leased.

Fortune expected to expand Phase I by another 1.4MW before the end of the first quarter of 2012. It is also currently in the process of pre-leasing the future second phase, expected to bring an additional 7MW of critical load online.

In October 2011, Fortune announced it was building a data center in the Portland, Oregon, area. The facility is expected to provide 7.8MW of IT load at completion of Phase I.

Criteria for M&O approval are derived from the Uptime Institute’s Tier Standard: Operational Sustainability guidelines, published in 2010.

Uptime, division of the 451 Group, announced the M&O program in February 2012. The organization had already issued the stamp of approval for four data centers by the time it made the announcement: Equinix in Ashburn, Virginia, Progressive Insurance in the Colorado area and Morgan Stanley and Colt in London.