Primus Business Services, a division of Primus Telecommunications Canada Inc., today announced it has been awarded Uptime Institute’s Tier III Certification for Design Documents for the first phase of the company’s GTA Data Centre located in Markham. This facility will be the only multi-tenant data center in Canada to achieve the rare Tier III Certification for both design and construction from the Uptime Institute when it opens in July 2012.

“The fundamental concept of Tier III is Concurrent Maintainability, and the benefit is that the Data Center will never be shut down to maintain or replace the heating and cooling equipment. Since the need for planned facility shutdowns is eliminated, Primus’ new facility will offer best-in-class Data Center services in Canada,” said Vince Renaud, Senior Tier Certification Authority, Uptime Institute. “Once the construction is completed and verified by Uptime Institute, Primus will be the first and only full Tier III Certified commercial data center in Canada.”

The value of Tier III Certification to Canadian businesses and organizations is significant as it presents to IT decision makers an unbiased validation that saves time and eliminates guesswork. Primus has engaged the Uptime Institute to validate both the engineering and construction of the data center. Without this rigorous Certification, customers must source their own expensive or time-consuming audits, or place faith in unsubstantiated marketing claims.

“This is truly a significant achievement in data centre design, construction and operations, and a significant milestone in the Canadian Data Centre industry,” said AJ Byers, Executive Vice President of Primus Business Services. “With Tier III Certification supplemented by PCI and SSAE industry auditing standards, the new GTA Data Centre will have the highest degree of independent validation in the country, giving customers unprecedented assurances of service reliability.”

“We are extremely pleased to be working with Uptime Institute to open Canada’s only Certified Tier III design and construction facility. The attainment of these exclusive Certifications demonstrates that we are providing the level of transparency and validation businesses expect from a strategic partner,” added Byers.

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.

Harris Corporation recently earned Uptime Institute Tier III Facility Certification for its new Mid-Atlantic data center, the Cyber Integration Center. The new facility is the foundation for Harris’ Trusted Enterprise Cloud services.

Uptime Institute Vice President Julian Kudritzki spoke at the ribbon cutting ceremony for the new Harris data center.

Concurrent maintainability for Harris Cyber Integration Center

According to Uptime Institute Professional Services Consultant Chris Brown, the chilled water system is a typical solution for a Tier III data center. It is a looped piping system with strategically located isolation valves to allow sections of the piping system to be isolated for maintenance without impacting the computer rooms. The chiller-cooling tower combination utilized packaged units. The packaged units ease the design to make the control system Concurrently Maintainable. In large condenser water systems, it is difficult to operate the cooling towers without automatic control since condenser water temperature typically needs to be held in a fairly tight window. This makes running cooling towers in a local manual mode difficult. The packaged systems use on board controls that are independent of the larger building automation system.

The interesting part is the UPS system, Brown said. A typical Tier III solution is to utilize a System + System arrangement. So if the design load was 1,000 kW the design would utilize two 1,000 kW systems. The management of that type of system is easy as one only has to ensure that each dual corded computer device has a feed from each UPS. But the cost is a 50% stranded capacity (45% with a 90% redline). Also static UPS systems do not run at peak efficiency the lower they are loaded.

The Cyber Integration Center used a different approach, utilizing five separate UPS systems. By evenly distributing dual corded loads across all five UPS systems the UPS systems can be loaded to 67% in normal operations. With a loss of a single UPS the total load on each UPS will increase to 83%. This allows each UPS to be loaded to a higher utilization under normal operations. This results in less stranded capacity. Also by increasing the percent utilization, the static UPS will operate at a higher efficiency than at a lower utilization. This system is more complex to manage as the dual corded loads must be evenly distributed across all UPS systems, but the result is less stranded capacity and higher efficiency.

In this video, Harris Cyber Integration Center Operations Manager, James Montgomery, narrates a data center tour.

This facility also won an Uptime Institute Green Enterprise IT award for water usage efficiency.

Congratulations to Harris on earning Uptime Institute Tier III Certification.

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.”

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.