Fujitsu Data Centre Gets Uptime Gold Certification

Fujitsu’s data centre in North London has been awarded the Tier 3 Operational Sustainability Gold Certification by the Uptime Institute for its continuous availability of cloud services.

It is the first facility in Europe to receive such certification, which ensures the infrastructure is being managed for uninterruptible uptime.

“Our Tier III Gold Certification from Uptime Institute provides independent authoritative validation that Fujitsu is delivering continuous availability, further ensuring confidence in the cloud,” said Mark Kerr, Fujitsu UK and Ireland head of data centres.

It also helps distinguish the organisation above its competitors, according to Julian Kudritzki, Vice President at Uptime Institute.

“We applaud Fujitsu for its leadership in recognising the importance of a ‘world-class’ data center management programme,” he added.

Continuous Availability VS Power Efficiency

However, continuous availability of cloud services requires redundant equipment to prevent data centre outages – and this means more energy consumption.

But the Operational Sustainability Gold certification has nothing to do with green IT, according to Mark Poley, marketing manager for data centre at Fujitsu. “It’s about how well the staff run the data centre, how they do their job,” he told eWEEK Europe.

Uptime vice president Julian Kudritzki also pointed out that “reliability remains key to the data centre industry. There are innovative and clever ways to get energy efficient solutions, but we have yet to see high availability clients make energy efficiency a priority,” adding poor management will defeat any site.

In an interview with eWEEK Europe, however, head of data centre development at Fujitsu Chris Flanagan (left) pointed out that the facility was designed with a number of energy sufficient principles in mind and is running at a PUE (Power Utilisation Efficiency) of 1.4. The company is also working to achieve an even lower figure in the future.

According to Chris, the certified facility management programme helps reduce human errors and ensure concurrently maintainable site infrastructure guaranteeing 99.85 percent availability.

Data centre tier standards

Uptime Institute – a consulting organisation that works to improve data centre performance and efficiency – has developed data centre tier standards to measure the availability of services in a facility.

The standards are comprised of a four-tier scale, each of which comes with different requirements. To achieve a Tier 1 certificate, the facility needs a single, non-redundant distribution path to serve IT equipment, plus redundant capacity components for Tier 2.

A Tier 3 certificate, however, requires the facility to install multiple independent distribution paths, with only one path serving IT equipment at any given time. All IT equipment must as well be dual-powered and fully compatible within the topology of a site’s architecture.

Among the four classes, Tier 4 is the most robust. The data centre must be fully fault-tolerant with electrical power storage and distribution facilities. All cooling quipment must be independently dual-powered, including chillers and Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems.

According to Kudritzki, Tiers 1-3 can all be made very efficient, but Tier IV centres will always lose in efficiency terms, since they will have redundant infrastructure using power.