Data Center Certification

Uptime Institute Tier Certification 

Today, every organization relies on a complex interconnection of digital resources for their business livelihood and fiscal performance. Shareholders and stakeholders demand that their data center infrastructure investments are well defined and fully supported as millions of dollars are at risk if the wrong choices are made.

Uptime Institute’s Tier Standards and the associated certifications are the single most important investments you can make to assure that these resources directly support business needs.

Uptime Institute’s Tier Standard is the globally recognized standard for data center reliability and overall performance. It allows for various levels of performance to be chosen based on the intended applications and business parameters associated with those applications.

With over 1,700 Tier Certifications issued in over 98 countries around the globe, Uptime Institute’s Tier Standard Certification is the industry standard for Design, Construction, and on-going Operations.

What is Tier Certification?

Developed by Uptime Institute over 25 years ago, the Tier Certification is a proven measure of your data center infrastructure’s capability to meet the performance level your business depends on.

A data center’s tier certification is based on Tier Standards, which are an unbiased set of infrastructure and operating criteria. These standards are unique and well-known in the industry for their rigor and comprehensiveness.

Why Tier Certification?

While others may certify data centers based on our similar standards, no other certifications same weight and stature of the world-class Tier Certification, and no other data center standard is actually certified by the standard’s author itself.

The Tier Standard is performance-based and therefore flexible to the changing industry. Because as innovative approaches and technology is introduced, it is included as long as the resulting infrastructure meets the same desired goal.

In other words, the Tier Standard remains as relevant today as when it was first developed.

With Tier Certification, you know your data center will be able to deliver the business services your company needs, day in and day out.

• Performance-based: Tier Standards are performance-based, not prescriptive. Any design solution that meets the requirements for availability, redundancy, and fault tolerance is acceptable. This latitude allows you to incorporate a wide variety of infrastructure and system solutions to best meet your organization’s goals for IT operations, costs, sustainability, and uptime.
• Technology neutral: in an ever-changing technology landscape, Tier classification does not require or rely on any fixed set of technologies. The Standards are able to encompass new and innovative solutions for data center systems and engineering, such as modular configurations, OCP, and leading-edge power and cooling approaches.
• Vendor agnostic: Uptime Institute is an independent services organization without any affinity to hardware or brand. This enables the Tier Standard criteria to be vendor-neutral and unbiased.
• Flexible: The performance-based nature of the Tier standards gives organizations flexibility to comply with local statutes, codes, and regulations while enjoying full Tier certification and the business benefits of doing so.
• Lifecycle: Beginning with the Tier Standard in the Design Document phase and continuing with the Constructed Facility and Operational Sustainability phases, the Tier Standard has you covered.
• Certification: The Standard is administered by the author of the standard itself, assuring the letter of the standard and encompassing the vast experience of our team. Tier Certification is not theory, it is fact. It is a recognized certification by an independent engineering team with a correctly implemented vision, and an implementation to meet stated business needs.

Simply put, Uptime Institute’s Data Center Tier Certification is helping enterprises, owners, and operators increase efficiency, reduce risk and cost, and meet the highest levels of infrastructure performance around the globe.

This Program Includes:

• Assessment of designed facility performance, capacity and engineering requirements
• Assessment of mechanical & electrical systems as well as architectural and site considerations
• Vendor and contractor-independent third-party review of design documents

This Program Includes:

• Third-party verification that your facility has been constructed to Tier-Certified design documents
• Live demonstrations of key systems under real-world conditions to validate facility performance
• Focus on identifying and addressing construction issues prior to facility operations commencing

This Program Includes:

• Comprehensive assessment of Tier-Certified facility management and operations practices
• Identification of management and operations issues that can compromize reliability and performance
• Emphasis on achieving operational best-practices to attain full potential of installed infrastructure

This Program Includes:

• Pre-validation of the modular data center at the manufacturer level
• Reduction of certification time by 65% due to pre-validation process
• Discounted cost for full Tier Certification of design, facility & operations

Learn More About This Program >>