What with the EPA’s recent release of their Energy Star certification for data centers, it seems like a good time to keep regularizing the industry, so the Uptime Institute’s standard for Operational Sustainability is very aptly timed.

The Institute’s Tier system has long been influential where enterprise data centers are concerned, and releasing new standards and continuing to call facilities to task is definitely helpful.  Operational Sustainability mostly refers to performance in the three areas of management and operations, building characteristics, and site location.

Usually the word “sustainability” brings an environmental connotation, but that’s not the point of this new standard.  It’s more to do with redundancy and maintaining the ongoing sharpness of a facility’s standards.  Of course the Institute’s own site will have more, but those three categories are pretty much what you would expect - management and operations is exactly what it sounds like, likewise with building characteristics, and site location is mostly related to natural disasters.  It looks like they’re leaving environmental concerns to the EPA, which seems very rational.

The three categories are prioritized in the order I’ve listed them, and weighted according to abnormal incident reports which the Institute has catalogued.  An example of the weighting:  these “AIRs” show that 70% of outages the Institute hears about are because a person somewhere screwed something up, which falls under management and operations - hence its #1 status on the list of elements making up the new standard.

See Data Center Knowledge’s article or ZDnet’s for more.  Reliability and standardization between facilities is a noble goal, and it’s encouraging to see it becoming more of a reality lately.


Elizabeth English

---

Share this with your network!