ViaWest has announced that it has earned the colocation industry’s first-ever North American Tier IV Design Certification for its new Lone Mountain colocation facility in North Las Vegas. The Uptime Institute’s Tier IV design certification is the highest rating possible, measuring the quality and reliability designed into a data center. The Uptime Institute is the leading educational and standards organization in the data center industry.
The Tier IV designation certifies that, when built to design specifications, the Lone Mountain facility will be completely fault-tolerant and capable of withstanding an unplanned event such as a fire, explosion or water leak, or failure of any power or cooling equipment, without any impact to IT equipment.
“ViaWest’s innovative data center design clearly debunks the myth that Tier IV requires ‘System+System’ topology,” asserts Uptime Institute Managing Principal Hank Seader, “and demonstrates that combined data center availability and environmental sustainability is achievable.”
“ViaWest’s design and construction team, led by chief architect Todd Gale and our engineering partner Swanson Rink, have delivered an unprecedented combination of quality and energy efficiency,” states Dave Leonard, senior vice president of data center operations at ViaWest. “Our customers now have access to the first Tier IV design-certified colocation data center in North America, which is also the most energy-efficient colocation data center in North America,” Leonard adds.
The Lone Mountain data center will be LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), Energy Star and Green Globe certified and is designed to achieve the best Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating ever—1.2—for a colocation facility. PUE is a measure of how efficiently a data center uses power for the computing equipment vs. cooling, lighting and other support environments, with lower numbers indicating higher energy efficiency.
ViaWest’s Lone Mountain data center will open in Q4 2012 and will offer 74,000 sq ft of raised floor space.
