Reliability. Experience. Trust.

Keeping Your Digital Business Infrastructure Running

Uptime Institute - The Global Data Center Authority®
Today, every company is a technology company. Our global economy depends on digital infrastructures and mission critical data centers
like never before. Nearly all businesses are transforming from older and more manual processes and technology to much more modern
technology approaches, including “the cloud”. What may be less apparent, is that this new infrastructure, regardless of what it is called,
actually exist in the form of millions of servers, storage and network elements located in thousands of data centers around the globe.

Companies worldwide need to be able to trust that this critical digital infrastructure will be available, no matter what else is occurring, as
it forms the very basis for their existence. And in the case of unforeseen incidents, is able to quickly recover and restore normal
operations. Customers and investors want proof that the data centers we depend on are reliable and sustainable, without losing sight of
the bottom line. No single company has the time, experience or global view to ensure this resiliency, except one: Uptime Institute. We are
the only trusted, global authority that certifies data centers—the infrastructure foundation of the digital economy—to ensure they are
designed, built and operated to support business growth.

For more than 20 years, we’ve helped the world’s leading data center organizations optimize their critical infrastructure and all of it
operations, while balancing costs, resources, performance, and efficiency in an ever-changing technology landscape. Uptime Institute’s
Tier classification system is the recognized standard for data center performance, with over 1,000 Certifications for Data Center Design,
Construction, and Operational Sustainability issued in over 85 countries.

The technology agnostic Tier Standards help operators increase efficiency and meet the highest levels of infrastructure performance.
The data center industry relies on Uptime Institute for guidance to design, build, and operate their facilities, and achieve their
sustainability goals. Our proven methodologies, education curriculum, innovative approaches to IT efficiency, best-practices research,
thought leadership, and the industry’s most extensive incident knowledgebase keep Uptime Institute at the forefront of the
transformation era.

Tier Certification
The global standard for data center resilience and Uptime Institute’s Tier Certifications alone provide the high level
performance of assurance of IT performance and system availability that
today’s inter-connected, 24 ´ 7 global business environments
When business operations rely on uninterrupted digital
demand. We’re not just the experts, we’re on the ground
infrastructure availability, you can’t take chances. And when
worldwide at leading data centers every day assessing
investing millions of dollars in a data center, you want to be
infrastructure, validating performance, and certifying effective
certain it’s designed, built, and managed for maximum
operating practices to ensure maximum availability.
availability and performance, minimizing unplanned downtime.
Tier Certification of Design Documents (TCDD) recognizes
Tier Certification is the premier industry standard for data
infrastructure (topology) functionality and capacity as
center resilience, offering an independent measure of
evidenced in architectural and engineering plans. It validates
performance capability against the most rigorous standards in
that the facility and system design is consistent with the uptime
the industry. With Tier Certification, you know your data center
objectives for a new project. TCDD helps align the infrastructure
will deliver, day in and day out.
design with the business mission, ensuring that an
Tier Standards are an unbiased and consistent set of organization’s significant capital investment will yield the
infrastructure and operating criteria that are unique in the desired result. TCDD is an important first step.
industry for their comprehensiveness. No other credential
Tier Certification of Constructed Facility (TCCF) ensures that a
carries the weight and stature of Tier Certification, and no other
facility has been constructed as designed, and verifies that it is
organization is authorized to award Tier status. When it comes
capable of meeting your defined availability requirements. Even
to the workings of core infrastructure systems—the heart of
the best laid plans can go awry, and common construction
your data center—and the knowledge to operate and maintain
phase practices or value engineering proposals can
them most effectively, Uptime Institute is the unmatched
compromise the original design intent. The TCCF process
worldwide authority.
includes live demonstrations of system functioning under real-
world conditions, validating performance and making sure your

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infrastructure can deliver maximum data center availability.
TCCF is the critical second step of the Tier Certification
process.
Tier Certification of Operational Sustainability (TCOS) verifies
that site management and operations practices and procedures
are in place to avoid preventable errors and minimize their
effect. Even the most robust infrastructure still depends on
effective day-to-day operations. By following the Tier Standard:
Operational Sustainability organizations can reduce their
human factors risk and maintain the desired level of uptime
performance on an ongoing basis with efficient use of
resources. Achieving TCOS ensures that your operations are in
alignment with your organization's business objectives,
availability expectations, and mission imperatives.
Management & Operations (M&O)
Stamp of Approval
Demonstrating sustained operating excellence and risk
management
The majority of data center downtime occurs due to human
error, but the number of errors as well as the duration of
incidents can be minimized if properly planned. Uptime
Institute’s M&O program can be applied to any data center and
provides the discipline and structure your organization needs to
reduce human errors and the risk of this unplanned downtime.
A data center environment is never static—even the most
robust infrastructure cannot prevent downtime if operations are
not being run effectively. M&O ensures that, on a day-to-day
basis, you have the documentation, maintenance, and
procedures necessary to prevent issues and react effectively to
any incident or operational event.
M&O is an independent assessment that validates the critical
facilities management and operations practices of any existing
data center. Regardless of the age or type of underlying design
and infrastructure, management practices and operations
activities are the most important factor in reducing unplanned
downtime and errors. Even data centers that were not originally
designed and built to meet Tier Standards can still achieve high
levels of availability and resilience through this M&O
assessment.
The M&O assessment incorporates a rigorous set of criteria,
drawn from the Uptime Institute Tier Standards. Based on over
20 years of research and experience, Uptime Institute has
identified the necessary actions for any site to achieve its full
uptime potential and reduce risk. These standards fall into five
key categories:
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• Staffing and Organization
• Maintenance
• Training
• Planning, Coordination, and Management
• Operating Conditions
Earning the M&O Stamp of Approval protects your significant
capital investment in infrastructure, aligns your teams on a
consistent set of standards, and provides independent, third-
party validation that your site meets the key criteria proven to
support uptime performance. It demonstrates your
organization’s leadership to stakeholders and the market that
your organization is consistently practicing effective operating
and risk management procedures.
The M&O Stamp of Approval can even help lower your
insurance costs. Many insurance companies now recognize
that organizations that follow Uptime Tier Standards (which are
the foundation of the M&O program) are taking the most
effective actions available to protect their investment in
infrastructure and systems and reduce the risk of costly
incidents and downtime. Organizations awarded the M&O
Stamp of Approval may qualify for reduction in premiums.
Over 140 data centers have been awarded the M&O Stamp of
Approval—including those at CenturyLink (now Cyxtera
Technologies) sites, Morgan Stanley and Infomart data
facilities—recognizing accomplishment in optimizing resource
use and excellence in data center management and operations.
You can set your facility on the path to mitigating the human
factors risk that accounts for the majority of downtime
incidents and achieving your business and sustainability goals
with M&O.
Efficient IT
Improving operational, energy and resource efficiency—and
the bottom line
Efficient data centers save money. Uptime Institute’s Efficient IT
(EIT) Program is an innovative approach to managing data
center infrastructure that yields reduced resource consumption,
lowers expenditures, and extends asset life span, while
delivering the ROI your stakeholders demand.
The EIT Assessment encompasses key aspects of
infrastructure, leadership, and operations, helping organizations
identify and implement effective measures to take and
validating their efficiency achievements. Earning an Efficient IT
Stamp of Approval demonstrates your organization’s
achievement in sustainable operations. Efficient IT program
offerings also include Server Decommissioning Workshops that
help organizations launch successful efforts to reduce energy
use, and DCIM Consulting to support monitoring practices and
associated decision-making, implementation, and optimization.
Join some of the largest technology companies in the world
that have already achieved the EIT Stamp of Approval. By doing
so, they have been recognized as some of the most efficient
data centers in the world, confirmed their commitment to
efficiency, sustainability and corporate responsibility. Your
organization can experience the results of dramatically lower
energy use and cost, decrease your maintenance and licensing
expenditures, reduce your carbon footprint, and increase the
value of strategic data center assets—benefitting your
organizations profits, your stakeholder’s values and the planet.
Efficient IT Program Offerings
Server Decommissioning Workshops
Comatose IT equipment is hiding in plain sight within even the
most sophisticated IT organizations. Idle servers, abandoned by
application owners and users but still racked and running,
represent a triple threat in terms of energy waste—squandering
power, wasting precious data center space capacity, and
incurring needless software licensing and hardware
maintenance costs. These needless costs can conservatively
be estimated at more than one-third of your entire IT asset
spend annually!
Uptime Institute facilitates workshops to help you ensure
justification, coordination, and success of a comatose and
greatly underutilized server decommissioning effort. Our
experts will evaluate your current asset lifecycle processes and
procedures, and facilitate mapping out and defining a new and
improved server decommissioning process. Applying tried and
true best practices, you’ll experience the benefits of server
efficiency: saving energy, reducing carbon emissions, and
lowering operating costs – using a specific plan to get there.
DCIM Procurement Advisory
You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and that’s
especially true of running a complex digital business operation.
Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools offer a
solution to measure and integrate asset and facilities data,
helping organizations to increase efficiency, improve resource
management, and enhance system performance. However,
getting DCIM to work for your organization isn’t always easy.
Drawing on multiple years of customer engagements, research
and market analysis, Uptime Institute provides advisory support
for DCIM procurement, deployment and optimization. Our
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experts help you resolve common DCIM purchasing challenges
and provide independent, vendor-neutral support in establishing
requirements, evaluating solutions, and developing justification
for DCIM investments. The result is deployment of DCIM that is
“right sized” for your organization, meets established business
and operating goals, provides transparency and efficiency, and
delivers the maximum ROI.
Accredited Tier Training
Learn from the industry’s top professionals
You wouldn’t trust an unlicensed driver behind the wheel of a
Formula 1 race car, so why trust your mission-critical Tier
Certified data center design, build, and management to a team
without Accredited Tier Designer® (ATD), Accredited Tier
Specialist® (ATS), and Accredited Operations Specialist (AOS)
credentials?
Uptime Institute offers training curricula specifically for data
center professionals, aligned to the globally recognized Tier
Classification System. In these courses, senior faculty
engineers transfer their knowledge gained from decades of
experience in thousands of data centers. Participants earn
professional designations that are respected throughout the
industry. They emerge from the training as experts in the field
who understand how to align infrastructure and operations with
the uptime mission of the organization.
Accredited by the independent CPD Standards Office, Uptime
Institute courses include instruction on both the Tier Standard:
Topology and Tier Standard: Operational Sustainability. Armed
with in-depth knowledge of Tier principles and application, Tier
Accredited personnel can create and maintain high-availability
infrastructure environments and react effectively to any issue
that arises. The Tier training programs encompass the entire
data center lifecycle:
• ATD is for individuals responsible for facility design; it
provides the knowledge to apply Tier specifications to any
project to meet owner mandates, minimize lost design, and
limit iterative design.
• The ATS course is for individuals directly responsible for
data center uptime and their teams.
• The AOS training focuses on effective and sustainable
maintenance and management of mission critical
environments.
Each of the credentials are awarded at the Specialist level;
higher designations can be earned at the Professional and
Expert levels with additional training and achievement. Uptime
Institute Advanced Seminars offer new and expanded content
for continued professional career development. Become a part
of the most elite group of data center professionals by pursuing
your Tier Accreditation today.
FORCSS®
A tool for effective enterprise infrastructure decision making
How do you evaluate the multiple factors involved with
selecting the various portions of your strategic infrastructure?
How do you weigh the costs and other considerations of on-
premise, colocation, hosted, and cloud solutions?
FORCSS® is Uptime Institute’s revolutionary offering which
provides a concise methodology to capture, compare, and
prioritize the various impacts of IT deployment alternatives.
This holistic approach helps organizations apply consistent
evaluation measures and align all business leaders on a
coherent strategy that achieves the optimal balance of
Financial, Opportunity, Risk, Compliance, Sustainability and
Service Quality considerations.
Under the guidance of Uptime Institute consultants with
extensive background in business-critical IT and infrastructure
management, FORCSS provides the language for effective
communication across organizations and silos. By using a
systematic methodology, FORCSS provides a basis for
describing, comparing, and selecting alternatives; overcomes
blind spots; avoids “analysis paralysis;” and yields necessary
and sufficient information to support executive decisions. The
approach offers the flexibility to respond to varying
departmental needs while gaining stakeholder buy-in and
alignment on the right strategy to move your organization
forward into the digital future.
Uptime Institute Network
The leading peer-to-peer community of data center
professionals
The Uptime Institute Network is where owners, operators, and
subject matter experts from many of the largest companies in
the world come together for meaningful interaction in a
confidential and lively forum for knowledge exchange—free
from the influence of vendors or concern over trade secrets.
Membership includes access to years of accumulated
experiences, resources, regional events, member forums,
evidence-based best practice information, benchmarking, and
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behind-the-scenes tours of state-of-the-art data center
facilities.
Attending Uptime Institute Network meetings qualifies for CPD
professional education credits. With membership, you also gain
access to 20 years of detailed error and incident tracking and
trends captured in the Uptime Institute’s own Abnormal
Incident Reports (AIRS) system database. Build relationships,
ask for opinions, share ideas and learn from peers in the world’s
leading community of data center professionals, innovators,
and experts.
Uptime Institute Symposium
The industry’s leading data center knowledge-sharing event
For more than a decade, Uptime Institute’s Symposium
gatherings have enabled industry professionals to gain insight
and learn from the experiences of elite data center operators,
researchers, and experts from around the globe
Held in locations throughout the world, the Symposium
conference programs focus on strategies for deploying reliable
and efficient data centers that are responsive to the business
requirements—with the ultimate goal of achieving IT
infrastructure availability and resilience. Symposium events are
organized into three tracks tailored to deliver the most relevant
and usable information for data center operators, designers,
and senior-level IT executives, including CIOs and sustainability
executives.
Attendees gain valuable insights and information about best
practices, technology innovations, project outcomes, and
industry trends. Attendance at an Uptime Institute Symposium
also qualifies you for CPD education credits.
Uptime Institute is the only organization that provides
and validates Tier Certification, the highest mark of data
center infrastructure availability and resilience.
When your mission critical digital business platform is in
question—Uptime Institute has the answers.
For more information, contact Waleed Amam
at wamam@uptimeinstitute.com or +0203 8564050 or visit
www.uptimeinstitute.com
 About Uptime Institute
Uptime Institute is an unbiased advisory organization focused on improving the performance, efficiency, and reliability of
business critical infrastructure through innovation, collaboration, and independent certifications. Uptime Institute serves
all stakeholders responsible for IT service availability through industry leading standards, education, peer-to-peer
networking, consulting, and award programs delivered to enterprise organizations and third-party operators,
manufacturers, and providers. Uptime Institute is recognized globally for the creation and administration of the Tier
Standards & Certifications for Data Center Design, Construction, and Operational Sustainability along with its
Management & Operations reviews, FORCSS® methodology, and Efficient IT Stamp of Approval.

Uptime Institute is a division of The 451 Group, a leading technology industry

analyst and data company. Uptime Institute has office locations in the U.S., Mexico,
Costa Rica, Brazil, U.K., Spain, U.A.E., Russia, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia.

Visit www.uptimeinstitute.com for more information. © 2017 Uptime Institute, LLC. All rights reserved. 170715_BR_01 C