Different Tiers of Data Centers

A data center refers to a physical facility (a building, a group of buildings, any dedicated space inside a building, etc.) which is used by organizations for housing their critical data and applications. A data center houses computer systems, along with the associated components, such as storage systems. Moreover, it has infrastructure for power supply, environmental controls, connections for data communication and security setup. The design of a data center has at its core a network of resources that have to do with storage and computing, and which ensure shared data and applications’ delivery. Routers, switches, storage systems, firewalls, servers and application-delivery controllers form the main components of a data center’s design.

A data center caters to centralizing a company’s shared IT operations as well as equipment in order to process, disseminate and store data and applications. Data centers are meant to support business applications and enable the storage, management, backup and recovery of data. As data centers house a company’s most critical assets, these play an important role in its daily operations’ continuity.

To digress, many renowned web hosting companies have data centers of their own. One such example is HTS Data Center, which is the data center of the popular web hosting company, HTS Hosting. Web hosting companies primarily provide the service of web hosting, which is a service through which websites are made accessible over the Internet. The most well-known web hosting services are usually referred to as the “Best Windows Shared Hosting”, the “Best Linux Dedicated Hosting”, the “Top Cloud Hosting” etc.

Returning to our main topic, data centers are categorized in various tiers, which are known as data center tiers. Let us now shed light on data center tiers.

Data Center Tiers

The term “Data Center Tier” refers to a system that is used for describing, in a consistent way, the various specific kinds of data center infrastructure. In this tier system, Tier 1 refers to the simplest type of data center infrastructure, and Tier 4 refers to the most complex type of data center infrastructure, which has the most redundant components. In the data center tier system, each tier contains all the components of the tiers that exist below it.

Data center tiers provide an effective way for describing the infrastructure components that are being utilized in a data center. This categorization helps an organization in selecting a data center type that is well-equipped with such infrastructure that best meets its business requirements.

Data center Tiers can be Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 or Tier 4. Let us shed light on each of these data center tiers individually.

• Tier 1- There is a single path for cooling and power in a Tier 1 data center. It has few, if any at all, redundant and backup components. The uptime that is expected from it is 99.671%, which amounts to 28.8 hours of annual downtime.

• Tier 2- A Tier 2 type data center has a single path for cooling and power. It has some redundant and backup components. Its expected uptime is 99.741%, which amounts to 22 hours of downtime in a single year.

• Tier 3- There are multiple paths for cooling and power in a Tier 3 data center. It has such systems that are capable of maintaining and updating it without taking it offline. The expected uptime of a Tier 3 data center is 99.982%, which amounts to a mere 1.6 hours of annual downtime.

• Tier 4- A Tier 4 data center is built in such a way that it is considered to be thoroughly fault tolerant. It has redundancy for all the components. The uptime that is expected from it is 99.995%, which amounts to a total of 26.3 minutes of downtime in a year.

Conclusion

Data center tiers provide information about the reliability levels that a data center is capable of guaranteeing to its customers. Hence, being aware of this tier system gives an advantage to companies when it comes to making the right choice with regard to which data center they need to opt for.

Source:https://www.htshosting.org/knowledge-base/technology/118/different-tiers-of-data-centers