Data center executives and Uptime Institute Inc. directors say the IT community is misappropriating Uptime's tier classification system for data center performance. Institute president Ken Brill attempted to set the record straight at the Uptime's Symposium on high-density computing.

The Institute created a four-tier rating system that applied the IT concepts of high availability and concurrent maintainability to the underlying data center infrastructure over 10 years ago. Tier-1 data centers are the most basic while a Tier-4 is fundamentally immune to planned and unplanned downtime. They had no idea the tier system would become an industry standard.

"It's evolved -- it was never intended to be what it is," Brill said. "We did it in response to a customer who wanted to explain to his management why he was spending the money he was spending. It