A 2012 Uptime Institute survey of global data center owners revealed that 85% use some form of colocation or cloud computing. Yet 54% had no confidence in their ability to compare cost and performance of outsourcing alternatives dependably.

Currently, the vast majority of enterprises deploy a hybrid computing environment. The decision is no longer binary—whether or not to outsource. It’s multi-faceted—how many and how much of each alternative to deploy.

The sessions at Uptime Institute Symposium will instill confidence in your decisions when working with a third party service provider.

FORCSS: A framework for effective communication and decision making
The Special Focus of Symposium 2013 is Uptime Institute’s FORCSS™ Methodology, a means to capture, compare, and prioritize the financial, risk, and performance factors that impact IT-dependent business decisions.

FORCSS recognizes and weighs the benefits and exposures of IT or applications deployment alternatives: internal data center(s), colocation, hosting, or public cloud.

Uptime Institute will present the methodology, and host a series of executive FORCSS panels that will explore how these decisions are made at large IT organizations:
• Methods for Determining Comparative Cost of IT Service Delivery
• Quantifying the Cost of an IT Service Outage
• How to Conduct Service Quality Analysis for Internal and Third-Party Data Centers

In addition to the FORCSS programming, Uptime Institute Symposium will provide even more expert advice on how to navigate the third-party service provider landscape.

The why and how of third-party data center due diligence
Many recent media reports describe enterprise IT staff’s “shock” at a third-party data center outage. But upfront due diligence could have provided appropriate insight into the performance potential of a specific solution. Investigating and accepting the specific capabilities of third-party data center services should be baked into your organization’s outsourced Digital Infrastructure strategy. Keith Klesner of Uptime Institute will share recent downtime anecdotes and explain how to be a better customer of third-party data center services.

Large enterprises and the cloud: Time to make the move?
In this session, Ken Male will discuss how IT organization in Global 2000 Enterprises are evolving toward the use of hybrid cloud architectures. Relying on findings from TheInfoPro’s full portfolio of research, Ken will share information about barriers to adoption and enabling technologies in cloud environments, including software-defined networks, storage and networks automation, converged infrastructure platforms, and orchestration frameworks. TheInfoPro’s surveys also tracks the performance of cloud vendors such as Amazon, Verizon, Rackspace, and HP.

Register today for Uptime Institute Symposium. I look forward to seeing you this May in Santa Clara!

Colt recently earned Uptime Institute’s Tier III Certification of Design Documents for two halls inside its London 3 facility. The Tier III Design Certification is an independent assessment of the capability of the design to continue to sustain computer room operations during any maintenance activity.

Earlier this year Colt became the first data center operator in Europe to be accredited with Uptime Institute’s Management & Operations (M&O) Stamp of Approval which it was awarded for its London 3 site.

“This is great news not only for us, but for our customers as well,” wrote Victor Smith, Director of Product Development, Colt Data Centre Services. “Certification is an independent assessment of our data centres’ resilience and as such ensures that our customers can be assured they are getting the highest quality design available.”

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.

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.”

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.