Bend Broadband was recently awarded Uptime Institute Tier III Certification for its new collocation facility in Central Oregon called The Vault. This 30,000 square foot facility is the family-owned cable company’s first foray into the hosting business and will serve the communities of Bend, Madras, Prineville and LaPine, Oregon.

Bend Broadband joins an elite group of colocation facilities worldwide, and is the first Tier III facility on the West Coast. This award distinguishes BendBroadband from the claims of self-certified data center service providers, which are often inaccurate. It also demonstrates Bend Broadband’s commitment to delivering the highest levels of availability.

Leonard Weitman, VP of Technical Operations at Bend Broadband explained the company’s business driver for pursuing Tier Certification. “Our target market is the medical industry, financial industry and telecommunications industry. They all require a high degree of reliability and security. We knew in order to market successfully to those industries, we would need to have Tier Certification.”

Uptime Institute Tier III Certification requires the data center infrastructure to be Concurrently Maintainable, meaning that each and every capacity component and element in the power and cooling systems can be removed from service on a planned basis without impacting any of the IT equipment.

In the first phase of Tier Certification, Uptime Institute Professional Services consultants work with the data center owner to identify a Tier objective and verify that the design team meets the criteria. This process starts with review and Tier Certification of the design documents.

Bend Broadband turned in an interim design deliverable over a year ago, which is a good practice, as design changes are less expensive early in the design phase. Uptime Institute consultants made a site visit in April for Inspection of Constructed Facility and worked with the design team to make sure that the design topology confirms the owner’s objective of Concurrent Maintainability. Bend Broadband earned Tier III Certification in June.

In addition to being Uptime Institute Tier III Certified, Bend Broadband is pursuing the US Green Building Council’s LEED Gold rating.

LEED Specific features include recycled dry wall and insulation, a solar photovoltaic array for energy offset and peak shaving, daylight sensitive lighting controls and LED lighting. The site also includes environmentally friendly landscape features. Bend Broadband is also purchasing 100% hydropower and wind through Pacific Power’s Blue Sky program.

Also , there are no batteries used in the facility. All backup power is fly-wheel based. Rotary UPS systems provide 35 seconds of ride-through on flywheel UPS systems, and it takes nine seconds to get backup generators online.

While LEED Certification is an indicator of a company’s environmental commitment, the bigger concern for the data center owner/operator is the energy consumption. Weitman explains BendBroadband’s efficiency intitiative:

“Data centers traditionally haven’t been very energy efficient. In fact, they’ve probably rightfully been tagged energy hogs. Computer equipment in general has been tagged that way. One of the things we wanted to do in our design was to make this as energy efficient as possibly can be. One of the measures of that really was this so-called PUE use efficiency metric. It’s a ratio of comparing how much is consumed by the computing equipment and how much is consumed by the total building. How much over and above the power of the computing equipment does it take to run the building. Historically, the number runs around 2. It takes twice as much power to run the building as it does to run the computing equipment. We wanted to run a building that was much better than that. We know what the design and modeling says to how well we’ve achieved our design. It looks like we’re going to run around 1.2… As far as efficiency or green, the true measure is the power you’re consuming.”

This is the first Tier Certified Facility using a Kyoto Cooling system.

Congratulations again to Bend Broadband for earning Uptime Institute Tier III Certification.