Introduction

A data center requires significant infrastructure to support the center’s IT hardware. These include power subsystems, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), ventilation, cooling systems, fire suppression, backup generators, and connections to external networks.

Design standards for a data center infrastructure

The most widely adopted standard for data center design and data center infrastructure is Uptime Institute Tier Standard.

Tier Standards are an unbiased set of infrastructure and operating criteria that are unique in the industry for their rigor and comprehensiveness.

The Uptime Institute Tier Certification (Design, Constructed Facility and Operation Sustainability) assures the IT performance and system availability that today’s inter-connected, 24×7 global business environment demands.

The four Tier Classification defined in the Tier Standard Tier I to Tier IV

Tier I: Basic Capacity – A Tier I data center infrastructure is designed to support business information technology (IT) needs beyond an office setting. This means there is a dedicated space for IT systems, and must include an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), and dedicated cooling equipment that won’t get shut down at the end of normal office hours.

Tier II: Redundant Capacity Components –A Tier II facilities are designed to provide an increased margin of safety against IT process disruptions and enable some regular maintenance activities to be done without interrupting live operations. Key elements of a Tier II data center are redundant critical power and cooling components, such as UPS modules, chillers or pumps, and engine generators or some other backup power supply.

Tier III: Concurrently Maintainable – A Tier III data center is designed to run without interruption. It doesn’t need to shut down for equipment replacement and maintenance. Redundant delivery pathways for power and cooling are added to the redundant critical components of Tier II. If your business relies on 24 x 7 IT availability, Tier III ensures that each and every component needed to support the digital environment can be shut down and maintained without impact on live operation.

Tier IV: Fault Tolerance – Tier IV site infrastructure builds on the capabilities of Tier III, adding the concept of Fault Tolerance. Tier IV is the highest level of availability, performance and resilience that a data center can achieve, designed to support mission-critical operations.

Fault Tolerance means that when an individual piece of equipment fails or a distribution path interruption occurs, the effects of the event are stopped short and prevented from ever impacting critical IT operations. Operations are fine-tuned to ensure effective and seamless maintenance, operations, and response to any fault.

Datacenter Operation:

Data center Operations Sustainability  is a broad term that includes all processes and operations performed within a data center.

The Tier Standard: Operational Sustainability provides data center owners, operators, and managers with the prioritized behaviors and risks intrinsic to data center operations. Adherence to the recommended behaviors will assist in attaining the full performance potential of the installed infrastructure. This Standard is a tool to help owners maximize infrastructure investment. Additionally, this Standard facilitates comparison of data centers from an operational perspective.

Tier Standard: Operational Sustainability establishes a baseline of site management behaviors by Tier.

Typically, data center operations sustainability are distributed across three elements such as:

Management & Operations:

Evaluation of the effectiveness of management decisions and processes regarding staffing, maintenance, training, and overall rigor of the operation.

Evaluation of the effectiveness of maintenance program which encompasses rigorous preventive maintenance (PM), housekeeping policies, maintenance management system (MMS) to track work, and service level agreements (SLAs)

Evaluation of the effectiveness of training program that ensures consistent operations and maintenance of a data center’s infrastructure. All personnel must understand policies, procedures, and unique requirements of work in the data center to avoid unplanned outages and respond to anticipated events.

Building Characteristics:

Building Characteristics include commissioning, building features, and infrastructure that can potentially affect attainment of availability objectives.

Building features can positively or negatively impact the availability objectives. Building features that support performance objectives include purpose-built data centers, adequate space for support and pecialty spaces, and controlled access areas.

Additional infrastructure beyond just providing power and cooling is necessary to support the operation of a data center. Mechanical support systems such as chemical treatment and fuel scrubbing extend the life of a system and decrease the risk of failure. Having adequate space to safely conduct normal maintenance activities also reduce the risk of human error. The space, power, and cooling exhaust points must be aligned and monitored to avoid wasted capital expenditures.

Site Location:

The highest level of functionality in a data center can be easily defeated by a local or regional disaster whether relating to natural occurrences or man-made factors.

These risks must be well documented, with the proper level of mitigation in place.

Infrastructure Operations:

Installing, maintaining, monitoring, patching and updating server, storage and network resources.

Security:

Processes, tools and technologies that ensure physical and logical security in the data center premises

Power and cooling:

All processes that ensure enough power is supplied to the data center facility and the cooling system is operational

Management:

Creation, enforcement and monitoring of policies and procedures within data center processes

Hydrotek Expertise:

  • An experienced team for design, upgrade, construction, Supervision and Operation of Datacenter up to Tier lll level.
  • Having UTI (Uptime Institute) Accredited professionals with relevant experience.
  • Presently having a team of  2 ATP (Accredited Tier Professional), 3 (Accredited Tier Designer) and 8 (Accredited Operation Specialist) and many experience engineer with

Experience:

KFH Tier lll datacenter

    • Construction of Datacenter Y-2018-2020
    • Successful teamwork to get TCCF
    • Continuing operations since 2020
    • Achieving GOLD certificate for Operations from UTI in Y-2022
    • Expansion of live datacenter from 2 MW to 6 MW- Ongoing project

Boubyan Bank Tier lll new Datacenter

    • Construction of Datacenter Y-2018-2020
    • Successful teamwork to get TCCF
    • Continuing operations since 2020
    • Achieving GOLD certificate for Operations from UTI in Y-2022

NBK Datacenter Upgrade

    • Upgrade live datacenter to Tier lll

Boubyan Bank datacenter Upgrade

    • Upgrade live datacenter to tier ll

Al Salam International Hospital Datacenter expansion and upgrade

    • Design and Supervision of expansion of a Live datacenter.

STC Datacenter

    • Expansion of STC live datacenter

Driven By Values, Delivering On A Vision.