Engineers from La Salle-URL share the latest news and projects in the field of network solutions in telematic engineering.

29 April 2020 | Posted by userDataCenter

Tier 5 Data Centers

The market is full of different implementation methodologies for data centers. Each and every one of them has some aspect in which they are different to all the others. This, plus the fact that deep specialization is required to provide the best service, makes it difficult to rank or evaluate these infrastructures.

The introduction of Tier 5 promises to be the most comprehensive standard in the industry, it not only encompasses the resiliency and redundancy in other data center rating systems, it also evaluates more than 30 other additional key elements. Such as long-term power system capabilities, number of available carriers, the location of cooling system lines, physical and network security and percentage of renewable energy used.

This standard has been introduced by Switch, a company that became the first and only carrier-neutral colocation facility to be certified Tier IV Gold by the Uptime Institute.

It is based on the fact that the advance in technology brought to the game major threats to the data centers physical integrity. These critical elements are not being evaluated by other “tier” rating systems. As a result, a lack of transparency in Data Center evaluation and the fact that most of them had conflicts of interest between the evaluator and the evaluated generated a loss of trust for these systems.

The idea is to create a DCSF (Data Center Standards Foundation). One that will be non-profit and lead by leading technology companies and experts.

This will remove the conflict of interest widely established in for-profit rating organizations such as Uptime Institute and the 451 Group bringing a new wave of transparency and trustworthiness to the data center rating systems.

All its standards will be publicly posted to assure their fight against misuse of classifications by other standards.

If Switch really brings this forward and this comes to live, we will really see what companies are brave enough to face a fully transparent test and we will be able to check if they maintained their evaluation level or not. It is time to see the true colors in the data center industry.

Alejandro Martí

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