Uptime Releases New Operations Standard

The Uptime Institute has released the new standard for data center owners, operators, and managers: Tier Standard: Operational Sustainability.

Uptime’s new initiative aligns with the growing industry emphasis on best practices as well as infrastructure redundancy, which has been the historic focus of the Tier system. For more than a decade, Uptime’s four-level Tier System has been central to discussions of how to plan and design enterprise data centers.

The new Operational Sustainability standard focuses on the three most influential elements of a data center's ongoing performance in the following prioritized order: Management and Operations, Building Characteristics, and Site Location.  The impact weighting for these elements is based on analysis of the Institute's Abnormal Incident Reports (AIRs) database, which demonstrates that 70 percent of the reported outages are directly attributable to human error.

The Uptime Institute defines Operational Sustainability as "the behaviors and risks beyond Design Topology that impact the ability of a data center to meet its Business Objectives or Mission Imperatives over the long term."

The Tier ratings, defined as Gold, Silver, and Bronze will provide a system for evaluating, comparing and promoting a data center's ongoing operational capabilities based on its Tier objective. Ratings demonstrate management and operations and building characteristics, with Gold demonstrating exceptional characteristics, Silver demonstrating evolved characteristics and Bronze demonstrating minimal characteristics.  Within the characteristics tables there are also bonus behaviors identified such as third party certifications and behaviors beyond the stated Tier objective.

"The Institute's Tier Classification System ensures a data center facility is designed and built to deliver uptime in accordance with its business requirements; Operational Sustainability ensures the site is managed to sustain that level of availability over the long-term," said Julian Kudritzki, vice president, Uptime Institute, LLC.

Operational Sustainability assessments and Certifications are provided exclusively by the Uptime Institute.  The new Tier Standard: Operational Sustainability document can be downloaded from the Institute's web site.