About Data Centre Tiers
Every hosting provider will advertise their state-of-the-art data centre, but how can you really tell what features are being offered?
To help shed some light on this, a four tier system was pioneered by The Uptime Institute to grade data centre infrastructure design and availability, this system serves as the industry standard today. The four tiers, as classified by The Uptime Institute are as follows:
- Tier 1: composed of a single path for power and cooling distribution, without redundant components, providing 99.671% availability.
- Tier II: composed of a single path for power and cooling distribution, with redundant components, providing 99.741% availability
- Tier III: composed of multiple active power and cooling distribution paths, but only one path active, has redundant components, and is concurrently maintainable, providing 99.982% availability
- Tier IV: composed of multiple active power and cooling distribution paths, has redundant components, and is fault tolerant, providing 99.995% availability.
Hyve operates Tier III data centres.
Tier I sites will have computer power distribution and cooling but may not have raised floors, UPS’s, or engine generators. The critical load on these systems is up to 100 percent of N. Even with a UPS or generator, they likely are single-module systems and have many single points of failure. The infrastructure should be completely shut down on an annual basis to perform preventive maintenance and repair work. Urgent situations may require more frequent shutdowns. Tier IV data centres have all the bells and whistles; everything needed to keep them running without ever shutting down for maintenance, no matter what happens.
| Features | Tier I | Tier II | Tier III | Tier IV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of delivery paths | Only 1 | Only 1 | 1 Active, 1 Passive | 2 Active |
| Redundant components | N | N+1 | N+1 | 2(N+1) or S+S |
| Support space to raised floor ratio | 20% | 30% | 80-90% | 100% |
| Initial watts/ft2 | 20-30 | 40-50 | 40-60 | 50-80 |
| Ultimate watts/ft2 | 20-30 | 40-50 | 100-150 | 150+ |
| Raised floor height | 12″ | 18″ | 30-36″ | 30-36″ |
| Floor loading pounds/ft2 | 85 | 100 | 150 | 150+ |
| Utility voltage | 208, 480 | 208, 480 | 12-15kV | 12-15kV |
| Months to implement | 3 | 3 to 6 | 15 to 20 | 15 to 20 |
| Year first deployed | 1965 | 1970 | 1985 | 1995 |
| Construction $/ft2 raised floor | $450 | $600 | $900 | $1,100+ |
| Annual IT downtime due to site | 28.8 hrs | 22 hrs | 1.6 hrs | 0.4 hrs |
| Site availability | 99.671% | 99.749% | 99.982% | 99.995% |
*Excludes land and abnormal civil costs. Assumes minimum of 15,000ft2 of raised floor, architecturally plain one storey building fitted out for the intitial capacity, but with the backbone designed to reach the ultimate capacity with the installation of additional components.
Hyve have provided timely, professional support accompanied by clear progress updates at every stage.
The most important element is the fact you soon get to know the team behind the support. They inspire confidence in their abilities and knowledge of the systems they support.
British Airways global audience means that traffic spikes can occur at any time of the day or night. Hyve's cloud platform, combined with their always available support mean that we can sleep... CTO, Reactive Media
A very friendly and highly technical team available to extend all possible help at any time. Excellent services - all issues are dealt with appropriate priority and resolved asap. I am particularly impressed by...
The scalability of the cloud platform allows us to cope with high spontaneous levels of demand, and we know there are always Hyve staff available to help us handle the largest influx of traffic. CTO, Reactive Media
We're extremely happy with the service Hyve provide to us. In particular, we are incredibly impressed by the professionalism, expertise, and consistently rapid response of the support team.
It's reassuring to know that Hyve will take care of everything server-side so we can focus on doing what we do, building the website.
We've been using Hyve for over a year now for a wide range of websites, all with different requirements and issues, and we've always found Hyve amazingly fast to respond, incredibly helpful, proactive...
My experiences with Hyve have been very good. The response time is quick so you don't spend your time on a telephone waiting. The staff are always very efficient. Thank you all for your help and patience.
Since moving our servers to the Hyve infrastructure I have nothing but good things to say about the levels of service received. I find the support I receive to be of excellent quality and very timely...
At Hyve, we are committed to making a positive contribution to the protection of the environment. In addition to providing carbon neutral hosting services, we are also taking further responsibility to pitch in to the preservation of the environment.
- Employee Environmental Protection Practices
- Carbon Offsetting
- Energy Usage Reduction
