Page 27 - Telecom Reseller February March 2014

Telecom Reseller 27
February/March 2014

Audin

How real is cloud data center

sustainability?

BTy Gary Audin
promoting that they have Uptime Institute
he advent of cloud services offered Tier III conformance but never had the
through data centers begs the ques- Institute certify that this was true. The stan-
tion, “How reliable are the cloud
dards for Tier I through IV as specified by
services?” The cloud service data centers the Uptime Institute have unfortunately been
can be configured many ways, from non- used as generic terms leading to assumption
redundant to fully redundant operation. The made by enterprises that the data centers
non-redundant is the least reliable while the satisfy the Institute’s requirements but have
fully redundant is expected to be the most never been certified by the Institute.
reliable but also the most expense to imple- Reliability numbers do not include
ment and operate. Are you sure that the Even with the best infrastructure design,
operators of cloud data centers are provid- there will events that will reduce the reli-
ing useful or misleading information about ability of a data center such as:
their sustainability?
• Power failure
At least one company has been caught
• Operator errors
• Malicious behavior and attacks
• Fire
• Flood
• Storms/hurricanes
You need to understand that in most
cases, the service interruptions caused by
the above are not counted against the reli-
ability computations by the data center
operators. Leaving out these unpredictable
events is reasonable but the reliability com-
putations will produce higher reliability
numbers than may be the real experience.
The Uptime Institute
The Uptime Institute defines the ser-
vice sustainability levels for data centers
from Tier I through IV. The document
description on their website states, “The
Uptime Institute has released the latest
version of the Tier Standard: Operational
Sustainability effective 1 April 2013.
The Owners Advisory Committee con-
sists of those organizations that have suc-
cessfully achieved Tier Certification. The
changes to the Standard reflect the experi-
ence of those organizations completing cer-
tification and the experience of the Uptime
Institute.... The current Gold, Silver, and
Bronze Operational Sustainability ratings
are still applicable for Certification. Uptime
Institute’s Tier Standard: Operational Sustainability establishes the behaviours and
risks beyond the Tier Classification System
(I, II, III, IV) that impact long-term data
center performance. This Standard unifies
the site management behaviours with the
Tier functionality of the site infrastructure in
order to achieve the organization’s business
objectives or mission imperatives.”
Tier I through IV configurations

A white paper “Tier Classifications
Define Infrastructure Performance”
describes the Uptime Institutes Tier struc- tures. None of the Tier descriptions provide
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) and
Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) numbers,
only how well the configuration is designed.
This means that a Tier IV configuration is
more reliable than a Tier I configuration but
there are no metrics to compare how much
better a Tier IV configuration operates.
Tier I is the least reliable data center
infrastructure. It consists of a non-redun-
dant computer/server configuration with a
single non-redundant network serving the
computers/servers.
Tier II has redundant capacity com-
puter/servers but is still restricted to a
single non-redundant network serving the
computers/servers. It is designed to be
more reliable than a Tier I configuration.
Tier III configurations are the most
commonly mentioned and awarded when describing a data center configuration. It has
redundant equipment with more than one
network serving the equipment. It is normal
that only one network is operating with a
second network operating in standby mode.

See AUDIN, page 30