Here's why you should go for a Tier-4 Data Center

Here is a simple analogy to answer this question. Given the opportunity, would you stay in a five star hotel or a four star? Though unrelated, this analogy gives a very clear sense of direction, even in the case of data centers.

Data centers are classified into 4 tiers on the basis of several performance criteria:

• Tier-1: A guarantee of 99.671% availability (28.8 hours of downtime per year)
• Tier-2: A guarantee of 99.749% availability (22 hours of downtime per year)
• Tier-3: A guarantee of 99.982% availability (1.6 hours of downtime per year)
• Tier-4: A guarantee of 99.995% availability (only 26.28 minutes of downtime per year)

While most data centers in India are tier-3. Tier-4 data centers present a whole new paradigm of reliability. The comparison table below explains why.

Certifying Data Centers

Data centers are certified as tier-3 or -4 by certifying bodies like TIA and Uptime. A TIA certified data center is inspected on close to 1,800 parameters, some of them being the data center's design, the engineering design, the history of natural calamities that have occurred in the data center's location, the cabling and even greenhouse gas emissions. It is after these multi-point checks that a data center is certified with a tier-4 rating. There are several tier-3 data centers in the market today that advertise themselves as ‘Tier-4 Ready', but these facilities have not gone through the microscopic inspection of a certifying agency.

Tier-3 data center is fine was the opinion a few years ago. This opinion is driven by companies from developed countries like the US and Europe where the utilities like power and water are robust and there's hardly any downtime. Whereas in India, we face power cuts and water shortage. How can a tier-3 system give the same uptime in India as in western countries? Not possible.

Tier-3 is a ‘single system' and tier-4 is a ‘system + system'. They have dual storage capacity than that of tier-3. Building structure is more robust and security features are better.

If your applications are mission critical, and you would lose business because of an hour's downtime, tier-4 data centers are your best bet. They are built to withstand earthquakes, floods, fires, and have several physical security zones to defend your data from human intrusions.