Duong Ly

MIS 2501

Under the current Tier I infrastructure topology, our business operation is experiencing about 28.9 hours downtime per year, which costs our company more than $77 million over three year period. In comparison, Tier I has non-redundant capacity
components with only one single uplink and server while Tier III has dual powered equipment and multiple uplinks. In other word, Tier III would significantly decrease the companys

downtime from 28.9 to less than 1.75 hours per year. That being said, if we upgrade our IT infrastructure to Tier III, on average, our company would save at least $12 million per annum in the next three years. One big advantage that sets Tier III apart from Tier I is that the Tier III has redundant components, which means it is a concurrently maintainable site infrastructure with expected availability of 99.98% as opposed to what Tier I can offer 99.67% (Nixcraft). As described by The Uptime Institute, besides multiple active power sources, Tier III data center also uses several cooling distribution paths, which would effectively decrease the excessive heat distributing by the center (Turner). One main disadvantage of Tier I is the need to shutdown the system entirely to perform periodical maintenance, which severely affects our business operation. In contrast, Tier III allows us not only to perform above-mentioned tasks without affecting other IT systems but also create a backup system to prevent unplanned disruptions (Cisco Systems). Based upon the infrastructure tier standard analysis between Tier I and Tier III above, I strongly recommend our company to replace Tier I with Tier III data center. Besides the benefit of tremendously increasing our operational efficiency and effectiveness the Tier III IT system would decrease our downtime cost from $25.6 million to less than $1.6 million per annum. With the initial investment of $35 millions, our company will save at least $37 million over a three years period. Thus, investing in this advanced topology is essential to our company in term of saving millions of dollars and creating competitive advantages over our competitors.

Duong Ly

MIS 2501

Duong Ly

MIS 2501

Citation
Turner IV, W. Pitt, John H. Seader, Vincent E. Renaud. Data Center Site Infrastructure Tier Standard: Topology. Uptime Institute LLC. 2010. Web
Nixcraft. "Explain: Tier 1 / Tier 2 / Tier 3 / Tier 4 Data Center." http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/data-centerstandard-overview/. N.p., 29 Jan. 2011. Web. 05 Sept. 2013. Cisco Systems. "Data Center Multi-Tier Model Design [Design Zone for Data Centers] ."http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/solutions/Enterprise/Data_Center/DC_Infra2_5/DCInfra_2.ht ml N.p., 15 Sept. 2012. Web. 05 Sept. 2013.