The development and certification of industry standards provides an essential component for growth in the data centre industry. They provide a recognised level of performance and a clear set of metrics for measuring it. Unfortunately, when evaluating data centre vendors, customers often have to navigate between what is real and what is hype.
There are a number of standards for equipment which is used within the data centre, with the follow being most common;
- Uptime Institute Tier Standard
- ASHRAE 9.9
- The Green Grid PUE
The most well known is the Tier standard which has the worst level of certification in the industry, with 39% of data centres designed to Uptime specifications not achieving certification. Despite many large data centre vendors claiming ‘paper compliance’ with the Uptime standard, few elect to have their designs certified by them.
The PUE metric is used to measure data centre efficiency and is probably the most misunderstood of all within the data centre industry. In the Uptime Institute's 2013 Data Centre Survey, 34% of respondents didn’t measure PUE at all and 4% reported a PUE of 1.0 or less.
The ASHRAE standard describes acceptable operating ranges for humidity and temperature within the data centre. Despite the envelope for IT equipment extending upwards in recent years, 97% of respondents to the Uptime survey still have an average supply temperature of 24degC or less.
Customers often fail to ask for evidence of compliance to standards and attempt to assess vendors on the claims of their marketing alone. By failing to provide evidence of their compliance, data centre vendors weaken the validity of these standards.
In an increasingly customer driven marketplace, this type of behaviour by data centre vendors should become increasingly unacceptable and hopefully lead to greater clarity within the industry.