Are Data Center "Tiers" Still Relevant?

miller60 writes "In their efforts at uptime, are data centers relying too much on infrastructure and not enough on best practices? That question is at the heart of an ongoing industry debate about the merits of the tier system, a four-level classification of data center reliability developed by The Uptime Institute. Critics assert that the historic focus on Uptime tiers prompts companies to default to Tier III or Tier IV designs that emphasize investment in redundant UPSes and generators. Uptime says that many industries continue to require mission-critical data centers with high levels of redundancy, which are needed to perform maintenance without taking a data center offline. Given the recent series of data center outages and the current focus on corporate cost control, the debate reflects the industry focus on how to get the most uptime for the data center dollar."

Comments

Perfect illustration

[jeffmeden]

Given the recent series of data center outages and the current focus on corporate cost control, the debate reflects the industry focus on how to get the most uptime for the data center dollar.

Repeat after me: There is no replacement for redundancy. There is no replacement for redundancy. Every outage you read about involves a failure in a feature of the datacenter that was not redundant and was assumed to not need to be redundant... assumed *incorrectly*. Redundancy is irreplaceable. If you rely on your servers (the servers housed in one place) you had better have redundancy for EVERY. SINGLE. OTHER. ASPECT. If not, you can expect downtime, and you can expect it to happen at the worst possible moment.

Re:But it's never the software...

[Maximum Prophet]

Code scales, hardware doesn't. If you have one machine, yes, it cheaper to get a bigger, better machine, or to wait for one to be released.

If you have 20,000 machines, even a 10% increase in efficiency is important.