New ViaWest Colocation Facility Achieves Tier IV

Data center, cloud computing and managed services provider ViaWest has earned a Tier IV design certification for its Lone Mountain data center project in Las Vegas. This is notable because it’s the first Tier IV designed colocation facility in North America, according to the Uptime Institute.

Tier IV is the highest rating possible for a facility. It certifies that the Lone Mountain facility will be completely fault-tolerant and capable of withstanding a variety of unplanned events without impact to IT equipment. “ViaWest’s innovative data center design clearly debunks the myth that Tier IV requires ‘System+System’ topology,” asserts Uptime Institute Managing Principal Hank Seader, “and demonstrates that combined data center availability and environmental sustainability is achievable.”

The Lone Mountain Las Vegas facility is set to open in Q4 2012, offering 74,000 square feet of raised floor space and 10+ MW within a 110,000 gross square foot facility. The facility was initially announced in May of this year. In the Las Vegas market, they have another facility which is at capacity, as well as another facility from the CoreLink acquisition . The new facility was purpose built for energy efficiency and fault tolerance and employs a 2(N+1) UPS configuration. It is also SSAE 16/SOC 1 and SOC 3 compliant.

The company was adamant in stating that this will be one of the greenest data centers in the united states, and so far it looks like it will give the company plenty of bragging rights. In addition to Tier IV, The Lone Mountain data center wil also be LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), Energy Star and Green Globe certified. It is designed to achieve a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.2, which would place it among the most efficient published ratings for a colocation facility.

Upon completion of this facility, ViaWest will have more than 450,000 square feet of usable raised floor data center space across 24 data centers throughout Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, and Utah.