Tier 4, 3, 2, 1 Data Center Classifications Explained

When you are looking for a data center facility to host your server, the data center tier becomes one of the most important factors. It indicates the efficiency and security structure of the said facility which ultimately relates to the uptime, reliability, and performance of the server.

In this write-up, we will explain what you need to know about data centers, their types, their tiers, and more. We will also focus a little more on the Tier 4 data center as we are partnered with the best Tier 4 data center in India.

What is Tier in Data Center?

Tiers are what represent the data center infrastructure level.

When we talk about data centers, you need to differentiate between types and tiers of a data center. The type classification is more dependent on the number of owners and the purpose of the data center. While the tiers are all about the data center infrastructure. The higher the tiers, the better it is at handling unexpected scenarios and maintaining the workflow.

Data Center Tiers are primarily based on 3 things:

• Uptime/downtime
• Service cost
• Fault tolerance

One needs to get an official rating from Uptime Institute to have an assigned tier. But, it is not mandatory. However, getting a rating bolsters the:

1. Facility credibility
2. Trust factor
3. Better business opportunities

Different Tiers of Data Center:

There are 4 data center tiers officially available. These are:

• Tier 1: A Tier I data center has basic capacity and no backup facility. It must include a UPS and has an uptime of 99.671% per year.
• Tier 2: A Tier II data center has redundant and backup capacity. It has an uptime of around 99.741% per year.
• Tier 3: A Tier III data center has simultaneous power and cooling facilities.  It must have components that can be taken offline without hindering the overall workflow. The uptime is 99.982% per year.
• Tier 4: A Tier IV data center comes with fault tolerance. It has redundant components for everything. The uptime must be 99.995% per year.

The data center tiers follow a progressive route. Tier IV is better than the other 3 tiers and must include or has even better facilities offered by the previous tiers. That’s how the structure goes on.

What is a Tier 4 data center?

A Tier 4 data center is a high-grade secure data center with powerful redundant storage, network, and server components. It has the best uptime guarantee with a complete fault-tolerant structure where redundancy is applied to every component of the infrastructure.

We are partnered with the best Tier 4 data center in India and provide highly secure hosting services with an enterprise-grade structure.

A Tier 4 data center ensures:

• The infrastructure is supported by dual power and cooling systems.
• The distribution method is varied for each redundant component, so if a fault appears, it will not affect the other component, thus maintaining the workflow.
• In case of a power outage, the Tier 4 data center can easily run for at least 96 hours without fail.
• Physical separation is implied on all vital components.

Tier 4 data center has either of these redundancy structure:

1. 2N (N+N) – It has every component mirrored and ready on stand-by. If operating component fails, the secondary backup will immediately take over its operation.
2. 2N+1 – It has an additional backup available in case the secondary component also fails.

Types of Data Center

There are generally four types of data centers:

1. Enterprise data centers – They are built for a single organization. It is used for internal purpose and are not rented out to external sources. These data centers are for tech tycoons.
2. Colocation data centers – This is a completely rental data center. The server resources are up for grabs by customers who wish to rent that space for their use.
3. Managed service data centers – This type of data center provides storage, computing, and other services as a third party. They serve the users directly by helping them mange the resources.
4. Cloud data centers – distributed, sometimes provided to customers with the help of third party hosting providers.

Components of Data Center

The 3 prime components of a data center are compute, storage and network. If you include all the things that make up these primary components, you will get other things like:

• Servers
• Racks
• Monitoring structures
• Efficiency, security and performance policies
• Network connectivity infrastructure
• Security measures and appliances
• Cooling and air flow systems
• Storage infrastructure

Go For the Data Center Tier Right For You!

Hopefully, you will now choose the right data center for you to rent your server space. If you are looking for a Tier 3 data center or a Tier 4 data center to rent a server, you can always talk to our experts.

Talk To Our Experts

We provide many services that include bare metal servers, dedicated servers, colocation hosting, and more.