What are the Different Tiers of Data Centers and How do they Apply to Credit Unions?

If you are not either interested in the resiliency of your data center or your cloud provider than this post isn’t for you. If you are a Credit Union or client who is concerned about value and quality of your Disaster Recovery Hot Site or Cloud Provider Data Center than this article is for you!

Improving Operational Stability

Uptime. A brown out or blip which results in power failure of desktops, servers, or outage of entire systems will create an equal amount of anxiety regardless of the duration of the time for power to be restored. Of course, a UPS will cover you until the generator takes over (which by the way, if it doesn’t start within a 30-60 seconds, it’s not going to without a service technician to fix whatever is wrong with it). But are all of your systems whose downtime could create major or minor headaches provided the same UPS protection? A sudden loss of power resulting in a shutdown raises anxiety levels for your IT staff and employees… will it boot? What work data did I lose? Will there be file system corruption? Is my backup current? Will I meet my recovery time objective? Will I meet my recovery point objective? It can be quite an unsettling feeling from the very start the extent of the damage is unknown.

The Uptime Institute has kindly set a standard Tier structure for us to strive for to in order to increase operational stability for our datacenters and avoid these anxiety caused by failure within the infrastructure. Take a quick look at this summary of the standard tiers for operational stability;

Tier I – 99.671% Availability – (N)

Single capacity component for power/cooling and no redundant distribution components.

Tier II – 99.749% Availability – (N+1)

Redundant capacity components for power/cooling, no redundant distribution components.

Tier III – 99.982% Availability – (N+1)

Concurrently maintainable capacity and distribution components such that any single component can be removed from service without impacting IT equipment.

Tier IV – 99.995% Availability – 2(N+1)

Fault tolerant infrastructure where multiple operational and isolated systems provide capacity and delivery of power/cooling.

Many of you reading this are likely to be closer to the lower tiers than the upper ones. Consequently, you’re closer to getting tears from those reading your datacenter business continuity plan (you do have one, right?). Moving up to Tier 2 can dramatically improve your level or reliability by eliminating a few main sources of capacity interruption – utility power and cooling failure. However, there is a big difference in reliability as you move up to Tier III and IV. Even at Tier 2 with redundant capacity, many single points of failure to the delivery of that capacity still remain.Ongoing Operations Data Centers are designed to be between Tier II and Tier III. The Cloudworks platform is provided out of two Tier II + data centers.

It’s no secret that moving up in Tiers is typically expensive and therefore, it is often challenging to create a compelling argument for investing in infrastructure for the purpose of improved reliability. Ultimately, making sure you know what Tier your service provider is a great question a great way to know the quality of what you are buying. At the end of the day it is Technology and mistakes happen and systems fail. Do you have concerns about making sure your Cloud provider has the right infrastructure? Do you wonder how far away your data should be? If you have these or other questions please e-mail us at info@ongoingoperations.com.

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