A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and provides the required environment to these systems. The old day’s data center was a bit luxury but today’s situations a lot of SMB’s have data centers.

Problems Of Data Centers

We expect a Windows server to run forever but it’s not. An electricity outage may bring down the system if the data center has not enough UPS power. A bug in the network infrastructure will bring down the network. We can say a lot of different scenarios that may affect the health and expected operation of the data center.

Tiers

We can not prevent the unexpected events but lower the effects of their operations by making plans and redundancy. Also, we can meter the outage level and duration by setting limits. But Telecommunication Industry Association (TIA) all ready did this with start ANSI/TIA-942. In this standard, there are four levels to meter the outage. The level are called Tiers like Tier-1, Tier-2, Tier-3, Tier-4 . We will look in detail below for these Tiers.

Tier-1

The lowest level of the ANSI/TIA-942 standard. A single non-redundant distribution path serving to the IT equipment is required at this level. Also, non-redundant capacity components are used. Basic site infrastructure expected availability is 99.671% which will allow 1729 minutes or 28.8 hours outage

Tier-2

Meets or exceeds all Tier-1 requirements. Also redundant site infrastructure availability is 99.741% which is 1361 minutes or 22.6 hours outage.

Tier-3

Meets and exceeds all Tiers-2 requirements. Also as a plus, multiple independent distribution paths are required. All IT equipment must be dual-powered. Uptime percentage is 99.982% which means a maximum of 94 minutes. 1.5 hours outage.

Tier-4

Meets or exceeds all Tier-3 requirements. All cooling equipment is independently dual-powered. Uptime percentage is 99.995% which is equal to 26 minutes or 0.4 hours outage.