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As industries mature, they tend to
adopt standards. These are typically
best practices that have been formally
agreed upon that provide customers
with a level of assurance that the
product they are purchasing meets a
prescribed level of measurement for
performance, safe operations, etc.
Customers rely on standards as a
method of performing comparative
analysis on competing suppliers. By
providing a common method of
comparison, standards help insulate
customers from the need to make
their decisions solely on the basis of
the claims of a provider.
Over the years, the data center
industry has formally, or in a de facto
sense, implemented a variety of
standards such as ASHRAE TC 9.9, or
the Green Grid’s PUE. Unfortunately,
as in many industries, there comes a
point when a standard just isn’t
enough – that’s when a third party
certification gets introduced. You see
there is just too much temptation for
certain folks to make claims on
“standard” compliance when they
know that they don’t strictly meet the
standard at hand. When evaluating
data center providers, customers
often have to navigate between what
is real and a vendor’s standard-
inspired puffery.
MORE THAN A VENDOR’S CLAIMS
A prime example of the “phantom”
application of a standard can be
found with the Tier system originally
developed by the Uptime Institute in
collaboration with dozens of large
enterprise users. Comprised of four
(4) escalating “Tiers” that prescribed
the physical componentry required to
deliver specific levels of mechanical
and electrical reliability, the system
became recognized as the de facto
standard for reliable data center
design. Despite the broad
acceptance of the standard, few data
center providers have elected to have
their designs and facilities actually
certified by the Institute itself. This
avoidance on the part of providers to
actually having their claims validated
by the developer of the specification
itself is, while perhaps not malicious,
a misrepresentation to prospective
customers as to their facility’s fealty to
the standard—or any standard for
that matter.
In recent years, this “drive-by”
approach to the Uptime Institute’s (UI)
Tier standard has been exacerbated
by the penchant of many data center
providers to label their designs with
the designation of “Tier +”. These
self-proclamations diminish the value
of the standard itself by demoting it
from a recognized reference point to
a mere guideline that is open to
liberal interpretation. By severing the
link between structure and
performance, this mode of casual
compliance removes the customer’s
ability to make their data center
decision based on prescribed norms
and forces them to rely only on the
assertions of potential providers. The
gravity of this situation becomes
apparent when we consider that only
21 US facilities (as of March 2015),
out of an estimated universe of over
3000 MTDC’s in the US per 451
Research, have received any form of
Tier III review and acceptance by UI.
As a result, there are countless
numbers of companies whose mission
critical applications are supported by
data centers whose reliability is, shall
we say, undocumented.
The issue of UI Tier certification
becomes even murkier when the
number of “Constructed Certified”
data centers is compared to those
that have achieved design
certification. As you may expect, a
certified data center design means
that UI has reviewed the plans for the
new facility and verified that they
represent a Tier-certified data center
on paper. Unfortunately, what looked
good on paper isn’t always what is
actually built. In fact of the 21 design
certified data centers for the US listed
on UI’s website only 12 have also
been constructed certified. What
happened between the drawing and
final construction on the other nine is
anyone’s guess, but the customer did
not receive what they paid for. Due to
these discrepancies between
drawings and delivery, end users must
insist that their provider obtain UI
constructed certification to ensure
that their data center actually meets
the specifications necessary to
support their mission critical
operations. You can verify for yourself
at uptimeinstitute.com.
This same level of compliant “non-
compliance” can also be found in