OREANDA-NEWS. Uptime Institute has certified the Kompressor Data Center for compliance with TIER III requirements.

“Over the last few years, companies have become serious about business continuity. This is particularly relevant for industries where core business depends on information technology as a key business driver: finance, retail, transportation, communications and Internet operations. Keeping your business up and running despite the impact of any force majeure is no longer only a reputational challenge, but rather an opportunity to lure customers away from less reliable competitors. Only a high-availability data center can help you do this. Today we are not just a systems integrator that provides customers with a wide range of solutions and services — we have put our data center-based services and solutions into a hard shell environment and are excited that nobody in Russia can match us on that,” remarks Ruslan Zaedinov, Deputy Director General, CROC.

The Kompressor Data Center is the largest commercial data center operated by CROC. It is equipped with over 20 cutting-edge engineering systems. With a total floor space of 5,000 m2 (approximately 53,800 ft2) and total power capacity of 8 MW, the data center can accommodate up to 800 racks. CROC offers a number of outsourcing services based on the data center facilities, including colocation and dedicated hosting services, ‘backup data center as a service’, maintenance of the entire scope of IT systems, etc.

Data center TIER III certification confirms that all engineering systems are redundant and can be concurrently maintained, including adding new and replacing failed equipment without the need to interrupt data center operations. The availability level of TIER III certified data centers is estimated at 99.982%. This means that, overall, unscheduled system downtime cannot exceed an average of 1 hour and 35 minutes per year.

During the Kompressor Data Center testing, all engineering systems (including cooling, air-conditioning, electrical power supply, etc.) were disabled/shut down one after another — all while running at 100% of designed data center capacity. While the tests were carried out, Uptime Institute experts monitored all data center parameters from the end customer’s perspective to make sure, for example, that computer room temperature did not rise and that power supply parameters did not degrade. In addition, it was important to demonstrate the operational process maturity stipulated by each of the scheduled tests. Only a well-trained operations team can successfully go through these processes.

In addition, 99.982% availability implies data center autonomous operation. An autonomous electrical system must be designed and constructed to operate as a primary 24х7 power supply. During the three-day testing, the Kompressor Data Center was running on autonomous diesel generator sets. Fuel tanks were refilled twice and a total of approximately 30 tons of fuel were consumed.

“CROC’s Data Center has successfully completed testing and proved to be highly reliable and autonomous in-line with TIER III certification requirements. This certification puts Kompressor on a par with international certified data centers. CROC is the first and so far the only Russian systems integrator certified with such a high availability level. In addition, this is the first site fully designed and constructed by Russian specialists without engaging foreign consultants,” says Alexey Solodovnikov, Managing Director, Uptime Institute Russia.