A Tier 4 data center is the highest certification in the Uptime Institute’s system of classifying data center performance into 4 tiers.
In addition to meeting the requirements of Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 data centers, Tier 4 data centers must achieve the following:
- 2N+1 redundancy. Tier 4 data centers are fully redundant with double the amount of distribution paths needed plus a backup.
- 96-hour outage protection. Four days of independent power that is not connected to any outside source is required.
- No more than 0.5 hours of downtime per year. 26.3 minutes is the maximum amount of downtime allowed in a given year.
- 99.995% uptime. This is the highest uptime guarantee.
- No single points of failure. Since every process is fully redundant, no single outage will shut the entire system down.
- All IT equipment follows a fault-tolerant power design. When a piece of equipment fails or there is an interruption in a distribution path, IT operations are not impacted.
- Continuous cooling to maintain safe operating environment. The environment is maintained at an ideal temperature to increase efficiency and extend the useful life of hardware.
Tier 4 data centers provide enterprise-level service for mission-critical infrastructure. They ensure that equipment will continue to operate safely in the event of any mechanical failure. Full redundancy and fault tolerance mitigate the risk of downtime and high levels of security offer protection. The temperature and humidity in the environment is consistently kept in the optimal ranges to provide maximum efficiency and extend the lifecycle of hardware. As the most expensive tier, Tier 4 customers are typically international organizations with extreme demand of services.