In the data center market we talk a lot about uptime and availability to describe how robust the data center infrastructure is. At Datacenter.com we stick our flag to our consistent uptime track record, which is 100%. This raises the question: what do those nines mean as the uptime guarantee for your company and why do you care?
What means Uptime in a data center?
Data center Uptime is the guaranteed annual availability of a data center. Offering Uptime is one of the core business goals of a data center. Data centers must realize an unprecedented uptime in order to be able to align with modern business requirements. To achieve these uptime goals, data center providers spend a lot of time and money on redundancy, processes and certifications.
Uptime is basically the calculation of how often a particular resource is available during all the minutes or seconds of a given year. In general it is a fairly simple concept, but in the data center it can become a complicated one.
Usually uptime is measured in the past in “nines”, which is the case in the industry for calculations from 99%. That figure represents a ratio between the number of minutes and the total number of minutes in a year that a particular system or platform is available and working properly, which helps to increase the operational performance of a data center portfolio, an individual data center or a system or system component on a very detailed level.
The Uptime of the data center is generally categorized as follows:
- TIER I: availability of 99,671%
- TIER II: availability of 99.741%
- TIER III: availability of 99.982%
- TIER IV: availability of 99.995%
How is Uptime calculated
In terms of downtime, on the low side, two nines-99% corresponds to about 7 hours and 12 minutes of downtime per month. As the “nines” uptime increases – to three (99.9%), four (99.99%) and five (99.999%) – the downtime decreases. In general, five nines are considered a reasonably high reliability. And with six nines, or 99.9999%, an average customer in a six nines portfolio would experience about 2.6 seconds of downtime per month, or less than 32 seconds per year.
Why Uptime is important for your business?
There is an old saying that a chain is no stronger than the weakest link. In the digital age, the same can be said for data centers.
As companies continue to develop new applications and technology to remain competitive, it becomes increasingly critical that they are always operational. Major gaming, e-commerce and financial brokers have reported that milliseconds of latency can lead to millions of dollars in lost revenue. Uptime Institute stated in their latest report that about a third of all reported outages cost more than $ 250,000, with much more than $ 1 million.
In these terms, the difference between two hours and two seconds of downtime is clear. This is why organizations are increasingly transferring the management of data center activities to providers who have a core activity aimed at keeping the power and cooling environment up and running all the time, so that customer servers can continue to run.
Data center solutions will continue to play a central role as business and organizational activities evolve in the digital age. Companies and institutions will continue to insist on increasing availability and reliability of data center services.
Our mission is to achieve the highest uptime for our customers, for this we conduct routine operational excellence campaigns, related to frequent internal audits and optimization plans, and we subject our facilities and field service teams to rigorous training and testing to ensure that we always have the highest performance standards possible.