We’re very excited to announce the return of Hank Seader to Uptime Institute. Seader was one of the co-authors of the Uptime Institute Tiers standard, and co-developer of the Institute’s Accredited Tier Designer curriculum.

Seader will be further developing Uptime Institute’s educational and professional accreditation offerings. He will also be working on research and delivery of analytical information, valuable to data center owner/operators driving investment and management decisions.

Seader’s data center career started in 1991 as Director of Facility Engineering at Aerospace Data Facility, an Air Force run and DoD owned, computer and communications facility. During those years Seader completed four major design and construction projects, while managing O&M for $1.3 billion facility.

In 1995 Seader spent an interim six month posting with Uptime Institute, transitioning the Uptime Network’s AIRs information into traditional database structure.

He then joined American Airline Sabre eventually becoming Vice President for Global Infrastructure.

While at Sabre, he developed facility architecture for two new data centers, managed facility operations for current Sabre U.S. data centers, and helped create operations strategy for data centers in multiple states and countries.

Hank joined Uptime Institute, then called ComputerSite Engineering, in 2004, provided site facility infrastructure assessments, design consulting, and Tier Certifications. During this tenure helped transitioned Tiers from a basis of owner requirements consulting into an international standard for data center facility development. His last contribution during that period with Uptime Institute was development of ATD curriculum and delivery of the first two ATD courses.

For the past two years Seader worked for Swanson Rink, where his principal focus was to work with clients in developing data center infrastructure requirements through facility assessments and design reviews for compliance with owner data center objectives.

“I found my tenure with an engineering firm to be extraordinarily enlightening into the process clients use to determine their facility infrastructure requirements and how engineering firms strive to define them during the design process,” Seader said. “So much of what some portions of the industry feel are settled issues are not universally embraced by all data center owners – nor perhaps should be. My curiosity has lead me back to The 451 Group and Uptime Institute to discover why this dichotomy exists. The 451 Group and Uptime Institute have the global, market-wide access, resources, and perspective to root out the whole story not available to an engineering firm engaging the market project by project.”

In this new video, graduates of Uptime Institute’s Accredited Tier Designer curriculum discuss what they’ve learned from their experience, and the benefits of ATD accreditation to their organizations.

“As a professional in the data center business, especially where I come from, having a professional certification is a competitive advantage in the market. In fact, it is sometimes specifically mentioned in the RFP. Attending the ATD course has helped me tremendously in my career and organization,” said Adel Rizk, Engagement Partner at Edarat Group. “Having people from all different parts of the world, each bringing his own data center experience, makes the course very fruitful. Honestly, I carry the book from the ATD course everywhere I go.”