Digital Realty institutionalizes Tier certifications

Digital Realty, one of the most aggressive players in the datacenter solution market, has contracted with the Uptime Institute to make Tier certification a standard part of their process with new facilities. They plan to achieve Tier III certification on 20 of their datacenters worldwide starting with the five newly completed facilities that have announced Tier III certification.

While not at the level of the Tier IV fault tolerant datacenter, the requirements to meet the Tier III concurrently maintainable site infrastructure standard are still substantial; at the very least the datacenter requires redundant capacity components and multiple independent paths serving the computer equipment along with at least 2N power supplies and matching  installation to the site topology.

Digital Realty provides turnkey and colo services at their datacenters and currently focuses on their Turn-Key FlexSM POD-focused modular architecture. By building their facilities out to the Tier III specification level they are able to offer their customers a turn-key facility with high reliability and features that usually require significant advanced planning on the part of the customer.

The first five datacenters to achieve this certification are in Australia (4) and the United States (1). Digital Realty has not announced a schedule for the certification of the 15 additional Tier III certification projects for which they have contracted the Uptime Institute.