Tier III Data Center
[Flash Research Paper Assignment for MIS 2501, Enterprise IT Architecture – Spring 2013]
Our company will save $13.2 million over three years by implementing a Tier III data center. The ten unscheduled outages experienced over the past year directly affected order processing, manufacturing, and the ultimate shipping of products. To reduce downtime and costs, a concurrently maintainable, redundant Tier III data center should be implemented.
The fundamental difference between the two systems is that a Tier III data center is concurrently maintainable and offers “N + 1” redundant capacity components (Figure 1). This function essentially provides backup by allowing us to continue necessary operations, should an unexpected outage occur. The dual-powered equipment increases reliability in power distribution and delivery, a feature that assists in decreasing downtime. Specifically, downtime will decrease from 28.8 hours to just 1.6 hours per year (Figure 3). Additionally, planned maintenance and repair to capacity and components in the data center will not disrupt the computer system operations. With a Tier I system, planned work requires most, if not all, of the site infrastructure systems to be shut down, an inconvenience that affects computer equipment, systems, and end users.
To put these capabilities into perspective, the Tier III data center will increase system availability from 99.67% to 99.98%, a small increase that adds up. This will reduce current downtime cost by 94% to just $1,555,776 per year. While we will not see a net benefit in the first year of implementation because of the system’s initial cost of $35 million, over the next 3 years the data center will save our us $48,259,056, resulting in a net benefit of $13,259,056 (Figure 2).
Figure 1 (Uptime Institute, LLC)
Figure 2
Figure 3 (Colocation America)
Works Cited
“Data Center Site Infrastructure Tier Standard: Topology.” Uptime Institute, LLC (2010). Web.
“Data Center Tier Standards | Tier 1-4 Overview | Colocation America.” Data Center Tier Standards | Tier 1-4 Overview | Colocation America. Web. 03 Feb. 2013.
“Explain: Tier 1 / Tier 2 / Tier 3 / Tier 4 Data Center.” NixCraft. 29 Jan. 2011. Web. 03 Feb. 2013.