What is your Datacentre Infrastructure Tier
Our Datacentre Infrastructure is Tier 3
A Tier 3 data centre has multiple paths for power and cooling and systems in place to update and maintain it without taking it offline. It has an expected uptime of 99.982% (1.6 hours of downtime annually).
Fundamentally, your applications should be hosted in at least a Tier 2 data centre but preferably Tiers 3 or 4. The Tier system is a guide for the datacentre infrastructure design
As you move up each Tier you can expect more redundancy:
- Tier 2 data centres: redundant capacity components
- Tier 3 data centres: meet or exceed Tier 2 requirements; multiple independent distribution paths that serve IT equipment; hardware is dual powered
- Tier 4 data centres: meet or exceed Tier 3 requirements; the facility is fault-tolerant through electrical, storage and distribution networks; cooling equipment is dual powered.
The Tier system can be used as a rough indicator of how much downtime you can expect from your application’s data centre.
As Tier level corresponds to cost, you need to decide what level of redundancy you can afford and potentially how much application downtime you can accept.
Moving from Tier 3 to Tier 4, for example, will increase your hosting costs significantly.