Flash Research Paper 1- Datacenters and networking
Carolyn Young
Professor Doyle
MIS 2501
22 September 2014
Flash Research Assignment 1
By updating our current Tier I data center to a Tier III, over the course of three years the net benefit would be $37 million. The efficiency of the data center would be improved from 99.67 to 99.98 percent, and with the cost of downtime at $14,800 per minute the company would save $20 million because of the amount of reduced downtime the Tier III would provide. With 10 outages to the ERP system in the past year, it is essential for the company to reduce down time and cut back on lost profits.
A Tier II data center has multiple power and distribution paths with multiple uplinks, which provide alternative sources to power the data center in the event of an outage, and every capacity component can be removed without impacting the critical environment, which means that maintenance to the system can be done without having to shut the system down and take it offline, saving unnecessary downtime (3). The system also performs regular maintenance to avoid downtime. (1,2)
Upgrading to a Tier III would help reduce downtime drastically. If there are 525,000 minutes in a year and downtime costs $14,800 per minute, upgrading from a Tier I system with an availability rate of 99.67% to a Tier III with a 99.98% avability rate, the company would save $24 million annually due to reduced downtime. (Figure 1). The system would cost $35 million and it would take a year to fully implement but the benefits of $72 million over three years minus the cost of 35 million would equal total benefits of over $37 million after 3 years. (Figure 2). It is an obvious choice to upgrade to the Tier III data center and it would eliminate productivity loss during the ERP outages.
References
1) Craft. “Explain: Tier 1 / Tier 2 / Tier 3 / Tier 4 Data Center.” Linux Unix Tutorial for Beginners and Advanced Users NixCraft RSS. Nix Craft, 7 June 2008. Web. 22 Sept. 2014.
2) Beal, Vangie. “Data Center Tiers.” What Is Data Center Tiers? Webopedia. Webopedia, n.d. Web. 22 Sept. 2014.
3) Uptime Institute Professional Services, LLC. Data Center Site Infrastructure Tier Standard: Topology. Tech. N.p.: UPTIME INSTITUTE, LLC, n.d. Print.