Data Center Indonesia - With internet connectivity becoming more used these days, becoming more important, and so is security. 

Hence, Tiers certification is one method to find secure and reliable data centers. 

Businesses today rely very heavily on data centers, and these powerhouses process and safeguard critical information, ensuring seamless operations, which is what many purposely-built data centers are meant to do. 

However, not all data centers are created equal. The concept of data center tiers plays a pivotal role in determining the level of reliability, redundancy, and resilience a data center offers. It all depends on the business one is in, and what are the levels needed to store their mission-critical assets. Selecting the appropriate tier for your business is vital to ensure uninterrupted operations, minimal downtime, and optimized performance.

Understanding Data Center Tiers

 The last article briefly explained the purpose of having certificates, where a data center obtained them to validate its reliability and performance to operate for the customers. Usually, data centers would find and gain these certificates from organizations that certify them. One of the most prominent international organizations is called Uptime Institute. 

Uptime Institute is a well-known international organization to customers and partners for its highest standard criteria and requirements for data center performance, operations, and designs. It explained the bases of its determination of the facility level mostly on: maintenance, power, cooling, and fault capabilities. The organisation has a list of requirements and criteria to determine safety levels. 

Below is the list of Tier certifications by Uptime Institute that provides a framework for categorizing facilities based on their design, availability, and infrastructure components. Each tier represents an increasing level of availability and redundancy.

(Source from Dgtl infra, 2022 and phoenixnap.com)

The table above explains the difference between the Tier certifications. As you can see here, the higher the levels are, the more reliable and better the configurations for the data center which translates to higher SLA (lower downtime).

Tier I: Basic Infrastructure:

This is the most basic level, typically offering limited redundancy and a single path for power and cooling distribution. 

It is suitable for businesses with non-mission-critical applications and low uptime requirements. However, Tier I data centers are more prone to single points of failure. They are not designed for high availability as their uptime minimum is usually 99.671% with a downtime of fewer than 28.8 hours. It has no redundancy and concurrent maintainability.

This level can be the best choice for economical storage to load some data that doesn’t need much access for a while or does not require a lot of uptime availability. 

Tier II: Redundant Components:

This level of design has all the basic infrastructure criteria, with the addition of some redundancy, providing multiple paths for power and cooling distribution. 

As seen above, Tier II has a slight upgrade in its features, with an SLA of 97.741%, less than 27.7 hours of downtime, and partial redundancy. Though it has the same level of concurrent maintainability. While they offer improved availability compared to Tier I, they may still experience planned downtime for maintenance. 

Businesses with moderate uptime requirements but limited budgets might find Tier II suitable.

Tier III: Concurrently Maintainable:

Tier III data centers are designed to provide higher availability and reliability. 

They offer redundant components and infrastructure, enabling maintenance activities without disrupting operations. Tier III data centers can provide 99.982% uptime, making them suitable for businesses with critical applications and a need for continuous operation.

There are times when some data centers like Bersama Digital Data Centres were able to obtain this Tier III level, but with an SLA grade higher than 99.995% or on par with Tier IV. 

Tier IV: Fault-Tolerant Design:

Tier IV data centers are one of the top-tier when it comes to reliability and availability. 

They provide redundant systems, components, and distribution paths to ensure fault tolerance. Tier IV data centers can withstand equipment failures or planned maintenance events without service interruptions. 

These facilities offer 99.995% uptime, making them the best option for businesses with mission-critical operations and stringent uptime requirements. Should the industry contains confidential data that must be accessed 24/7, it is best to place these data in a Tier IV data center for higher security. 

So, which Tier Certifications are right for your business?

This all depends on the decisions of businesses.

While having the highest uptime Tier Certification is the safest bet for any business, it also depends on your operations and the importance of having them. 

But if the business requires a data center that needs high uptime availability (little to no downtime, higher securities, etc), then Tier III and above will have to do. This is because Tier III and above data centers have the highest service performance, security, and advanced equipment and they also have multiple distribution paths for power and cooling. 

As a result, when choosing a higher Tier level, one must also expect a higher cost due to its higher operational, maintenance requirements and capex investments. Not to mention, the operations and maintenance of Tier IV are a lot more advanced data center equipment to take care of as shown in the table above. 

Therefore, when choosing data centers, one must be aware of what kind of operations the business needs before deciding where to colocate their digital assets. Do they need one that must not have any downtime? More electricity power? Extra security? More spaces as their business grow exponentially? 

By doing so, data center operators can ensure what kind of connectivity, reliability and security infrastructure they need to execute the operations of the business to colocate properly. 

In Bersama Digital Data Centres, we ensure that our data centers have the highest security and uptime availability level to safeguard mission-critical assets. Our data centers are Tier III & Tier IV certificates with an industry-leading SLA of 99.999%, active-active distribution, and 24/7 operation for both options in order to keep the data center accessible anytime when individuals deem to. We are strategically located in-town in Indonesia, Jakarta, where local and global enterprises in Indonesia collocate and interconnect their digital infrastructure in one integrated ecosystem.

 To find out more about us, click here.