Press Release todayfrom Digital Realty Trust: Digital Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE: DLR), a leading global provider of data center solutions, today announced that it has contracted with Uptime Institute to achieve Tier III certification for 20 of its new data center projects worldwide. To date, five newly completed Turn-Key FlexSM data centers have received Tier III certification, including two projects in Sydney and two in Melbourne, Australia, and one data center in Trumbull, Connecticut.

“As a global developer, operator and long-term owner of enterprise-quality data centers, we have long since designed our Turn-Key Flex solution to meet rigorous engineering and reliability standards,” said Jim Smith, chief technology officer for Digital Realty. “Working with Uptime Institute to obtain Tier III certifications for these new projects further demonstrates our commitment to meeting these high standards on behalf of our customers.”

“We are very pleased to be working with Digital Realty, which has made this significant investment in the Tier III certification process. Many providers claim to build ‘tier III’ data centers, but few have the discipline to go through the rigorous process of seeking actual certification,” added Julian Kudritzki, chief operating officer of Uptime Institute. “The devil is truly in the details, including fuel systems, design temperatures for extreme weather conditions, as well as the integration of electrical and mechanical systems. Digital Realty has made this commitment because it understands its customers’ needs for highly reliable, resilient data center solutions that are designed to operate under the most challenging conditions today and in the future.”

Rigorous uptime requirements and long-term viability are usually the reasons for selecting strategic solutions found in Tier III site infrastructure. Tier III site infrastructure solutions also have an effective life beyond the current IT requirement and are typically utilized by organizations that know the cost of a disruption—in terms of actual dollars—and the impact to market share and continued mission imperatives.

Uptime Institute created the standard Tier Classification System as a means to effectively evaluate data center infrastructure in terms of a business’ requirements for system availability. The Tier Classification System provides the data center industry with a consistent method to compare typically unique, customized facilities based on expected site infrastructure performance, or uptime. Furthermore, Tiers enable companies to align their data center infrastructure investment with business goals specific to growth and technology strategies.

Digital Realty’s Turn-Key FlexSM solution is a modular approach to delivering secure, enterprise quality data center space to meet customers’ just-in-time requirements. Designed to provide maximum flexibility, reliability and efficiency, each Turn-Key Flex facility comes fully commissioned with its own dedicated electrical and mechanical infrastructure. Utilizing Digital Realty’s proprietary POD Architecture® and extensive supply chain, Digital Realty’s next generation Turn-Key Flex data center solution is designed for the future and ready today.

We have started publishing our annual Symposium Speaker Series — video interview with our underwriter keynote speakers. This first edition includes interviews by Kevin Heslin with key executives from Schneider Electric, Emerson Network Power and FORTRUST.

Data center dilemma: Build your own or outsource

DCIM + ITSM: Emerson Trellis and IBM Tivoli partnership

Adopting a modular approach for data center design, construction and delivery

Be sure to register today for Uptime Institute Symposium 2013.

This is the second blog post in a series that features continuing discussion with various senior staff of the Uptime Institute in response to the New York Times feature on data center energy use. The following was drawn from a discussion with Julian Kudritzki, Senior Vice President of Uptime Institute.

Many data centers are inherently wasteful due to the governing (mis)economics of cheap, high-availability computing. As long as IT reaps economic benefits divorced of true costs, then discipline in server procurement, utilization, and data center management is a ways off.

These favorable economic conditions delay motivation to change, but once dissipated, will transform our industry’s characteristics.

DAMS
Hydro power west of the 100th meridian in the US is fundamentally government subsidized. (See Marc Reisner Cadillac Desert.) Federal investment in Grand Coulee generated massive amounts of inexpensive and reliable power. Today’s result is that Quincy is a desirable data center location. Power commissions seek data centers as the ideal customers of high concentrations of power. Now those bulk power deals are unavailable in the Pacific NW (scroll past login for full article).

Cost are no longer sub-3 cents, but susceptible to market fluctuations. Arguably, Quincy’s data centers are the last IT beneficiaries of a federal spend made over 50 years ago. If new data centers flock to available bulk power, which is dwindling nationally, the cost repercussions will compel a new data center mindset that looks at the IT provisioning and utilization and data center capacity deployment with a much more clinical and harsh eye. And, if we look beyond western hydro, there will be cost and lifecycle consequences of the existing carbon-intensive power generation.

TRASH
The commodity server model allows for cheap and short-lived deployments. But, commodity servers are viable due to leveraged global labor pools and variable environmental regulations to dispose of the troublesome contents of a decommissioned server. Similar to hybrid cars, the sticker price does not reflect the cost of throwing it away. If foreign outsourcing of server recycling (i.e., teardown) was performed onshore at the scale of disposal, what would the total cost of a throwaway server become?

The consumer’s approach would evolve to extending the life of that server rather than replacing it. The irregular and need-based operation of diesel engine generators pales in environmental comparison to server disposal toxicity. Uptime Institute Survey shows 20% of IT departments pay their own power bill. Thus, is it safe to assume that the same percentage pay their own garbage bill?

CASH
For the enterprise, data centers and their contents are often treated as a cost center. For the IT and data center teams, the mission of uninterruptible uptime has been paramount. Thus, the prevailing management mode has been to hold nose and sign check. Budget reductions will threaten headcount in operations teams, but overall data center budgets continue to grow.

The unintended result of the favorable economic conditions is an unrealistic and unsustainable end user mindset of all IT functions available all the time. Many apps whose business value is not of the highest order have luxuriated in a ‘buy new now’ servers and enterprise-grade data center platform (i.e., power, cooling, monitoring, and automation infrastructure). Forward-thinking enterprises have been analyzing and distributing applications to match data-center infrastructure-level support to business value. But, these leading companies do not indicate industry prevalent behavior.

Debating whether server utilization is 7% or 12% or even 20% is a distraction. The issue is the economic factors that allow those low numbers to be perpetuated. There is a move afoot to compress IT, such as virtual server instances. But, the fact that this is an emergent trend shows how far we must travel and so fast.

OUTCOME: A BOON FOR OUTSOURCERS
A disruption in the economic conditions that IT has been enjoying will compel a new level of discipline and consequence in IT decision making. And, outsource alternatives will rush to propose a host of solutions to this economic crisis.

Many of these options will be so complex, or have such efficiencies of scale, that more enterprises will continue to divest themselves of data center facilities or entire IT assets.

A 2012 Uptime Institute survey of global owners revealed that 85% utilize colocation or hosting. Yet 54% had no confidence in their ability to compare outsourcing alternatives dependably. This is to the detriment of both enterprises and providers, as it calls into question the basis and viability of such commitments.

Previous IT decisions were based upon a narrower set of competitive offerings. 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.

Uptime Institute has been intensively developing the FORCSS methodology to weigh deployment alternatives with a full look at the major benefits and constraints of these options. FORCSS is the theme of Uptime Institute Symposium 2013. For more information on FORCSS click here.

Find the previous post in this conversation here. Photo of Grand Coulee Dam by Chris M on Flickr

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

Contact Anton Hios

for further details.

In this keynote panel discussion from Uptime Institute Symposium 2011, leaders from various data center efficiency groups discuss how these organizations could cooperate to improve data center efficiency.

Uptime Institute Executive Director Pitt Turner says we need to do more to drive development and adoption of energy efficiency metrics for IT devices. “We need to have something that’s simple, easy to apply, commonly understood metric for the IT side,” Turner said. “We need to boil it down to a couple of key metrics and start focusing on what is to the left of the decimal point on PUE.”

John Haas from The Green Grid says the data center industry has a target on its back. It’s a big energy user and we hear about it all the time in the public. But data center industry has not been very good at advocating its own successes, like driving GDP and digitizing resource intensive business practices.

Give us your take. What are the initiatives you’d like to see driven by the data center industry groups?