The fastest growing market for Uptime Institute Tier Certification is multi-tenant data center service providers in the colocation and cloud computing business. Over 50% of Uptime Institute’s ongoing Tier Certifications are for third party data center service providers.
In this video, Uptime Institute VP Julian Kudritzki outlines Tier Certification’s value proposition for data center service providers.
Uptime Institute Tier Certification provide assurances to data center owners and their clients, that each and every aspect of the design meets the objective, down to the breaker and valve positioning level. It is insurance for data center owners that they don’t pay for a Tier IV and get a Tier II.
The second benefit is the external facing value. Uptime Institute Tier Certification provides marketing value for third party data center service providers. Having an unbiased third party do the due diligence on the design and constructed facility can also shorten customer’s time to contract.
For more information on Uptime Institute Tier Certification services, please contact Tom Baehr, or download this PDF.
Uptime Institute recently participated in SearchDataCenter.com’s Data Center Advisory Board Q&A on capacity planning. In the article, Steve Carter, Uptime Institute VP of Digital Infrastructure Services explains how companies can start looking at long-term planning.
Carter warns that traditional capacity planning forecasting practices will lead to over-building:
“Many new data centers are significantly over built. My belief is that using common capacity planning forecasting practices in use today will lead to at least 2X over specification of spatial requirements. Common capacity planning practices are not keeping pace with the realities of advances in hardware and the software that enables visualization/consolidation capabilities.
“I believe this gap is and will continue to lead to over-specification of total data center infrastructure requirements from the IT load perspective. Understanding how application load drives IT infrastructure requirements, and how IT infrastructure requirements drive data center facilities requirements needs to be better understood at more granular level. In the past, a lot of this was guesswork. We can no longer estimate future IT electrical loads by simply projecting past IT load parameters based on historical UPS electrical load profiles.”
The Uptime Institute and 451 Group will be hosting a breakfast event on Thursday, November 17th focusing on Managing Tomorrow’s Evolving IT Infrastructure from 8:00am – 11:00am at the Harvard Club of New York City (35 West 44th Street).
To register click the link.
The sessions will include:
Cloud Computing: How the Global 2000 are Evolving their IT Infrastructure presented by Ken Male of TheInfoPro
The Digital Convergence of IT Infrastructure presented by Steve Carter of the Uptime Institute
for further details.
Family owned Central-Oregon cable company BendBroadband only recently decided to get into the data center business, but in that short time the organization has quickly proven it wants to be a leader in the industry.
The company earned Uptime Institute Tier III Facility Certification, and was the first site to be certified with a Kyoto Cooling system. In fact, the BendBroadband Vault is one of the biggest Kyoto Cooling installations in North America.
BendBroadband was also awarded the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Gold status, under the LEED 2009 Building Design and Construction (LEED BD+C) rating system. From the BendBroadband blog: This is a monumental achievement and one that we have been working toward since the initial concept stage of the Vault. This certification puts us in the upper echelon of data centers and makes us only the 5th data center in the world to attain this level.
BendBroadband is also an early adopter of Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software. The company recently announced it is using nlyte software for capacity planning.
I spoke with Steven Hall, Data Center Director at BendBroadband about the company’s DCIM use. Hall uses nlyte to help the organization bring new customers into the data center. Clients provide BendBroadband with a list of the servers they want to deploy, and Hall plugs those models into nlyte to plan out how much space, power and cooling will be necessary to meet the workload, and offers various options for deploying the equipment.
“We use it as part of our on-boarding process,” Hall said. “We help customers take a quick look at different cabinet layouts. Do they need a high density cabinet, or should we spread it out over two cabinets? The tool was perfect for that.”
Uptime Institute Executive Director Pitt Turner wrote a column this month for Mission Critical Magazine, exploring the top challenges facing data center executives over the next five years. Turner describes the future of data center financial management, availability requirements, operational best practices, and staffing.
Uptime Institute is now regularly publishing online videos: profiling data center leaders, commenting on new tools and metrics and showcasing data center operational excellence in its Network membership. 
