Forsythe Technology has announced that Uptime Institute awarded Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility to the new Forsythe Data Centers 221,000-sq-ft Retail+® colocation facility in Elk Grove Village, IL, on May 27, 2015. Forsythe Data Centers is one of only two data centers in Illinois, and one of only 44 data centers in the United States, to achieve Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility. Uptime Institute is an unbiased, global advisory firm focused on improving the performance, efficiency, and reliability of business critical infrastructure through innovation, collaboration and independent certifications.
Forsythe Data Centers is now open and housing its first clients.
“Our Tier III certification is an industry-best-practice, third-party validation of Forsythe Data Centers’, redundancy and maintainability,” said Steve Harris, Forsythe’s vice president of data center development. “Our clients rely on their data center facilities to run their business. They require maximum uptime and availability for their systems. They deserve data center building systems and infrastructure that support that. Forsythe Data Centers was designed to achieve Tier III standards, and has been thoroughly examined and formally certified as meeting those standards, which include being ‘concurrently maintainable,’ which means that every component needed to support the IT processing environment can be shut down and maintained without impact on the IT operation.
“Any design can be defeated during construction and testing. Forsythe has achieved Tier III Certifications of Design Documents and Constructed Facility, demonstrating ‘truth in certification’ through rigorous planning, execution, and system testing,” said Julian Kudritzki, COO of Uptime Institute. “The Tier Certification of Constructed Facility process includes load-bank demonstrations under real-world conditions. The award is based on review of multiple mechanical and facility criteria as defined in the Tier Standard: Topology, the globally recognized benchmark for data center uptime.”
Uptime Institute established its Tier Classification System in 1993. It is widely accepted as the global industry standard for determining the functionality, capacity, availability and performance of data centers. The four-tiered system rates from Tier Level I, for basic site infrastructure, to Tier Level IV, for significant redundancy, availability and fault tolerance.
Forsythe’s Retail+® private data center suites offer a one-stop shop for IT infrastructure and data center needs, with both remote and on-site support for strategy and migration, as well as managed hosting, managed security services, fully managed services, private cloud solutions, business continuity and disaster recovery services, and more. The suites range in size from 300 to 4,000 square feet, with 200 to 300 Watts per square foot of power density. Forsythe Data Centers is the new home of Forsythe’s Technology Evaluation Center and the Forsythe Integration and Configuration Center, enabling clients to plan, test, procure, build, migrate, house, manage — and even finance — the infrastructure to go inside their data center suite.
In addition to its Tier III Certifications, Forsythe Data Centers has been designed to comply with, and has applications pending, for U.S. Green Building Council LEED certification standards, SSAE-16 on the data center’s controls and ISO-9001-2008 on its quality management system.
