Tier III Operational Sustainability

The highest level of Uptime Tier certification is Operational Sustainability, which identifies and assesses underlying risks and behaviors that are outside of the scope of data center design and construction, but may have a significant impact on the long-term availability of the data center.

This certification stage looks at three key categories of data center operations:
- Management & Operations (assessment of operations team and human error potential);
- Building Characteristics (safety and security, engineering infrastructure, operating conditions);
- Site Location (risk of natural disasters and man-made disasters, utilities redundancy).
In addition to the data center itself, the site campus is assessed for compliance with three levels of requirements: Gold, Silver, Bronze.
As of now, there are only 10 Operational Sustainability-GOLD certified data centers in the world. Five of them are Tier III certified facilities (USA and UK), with the other five being Tier IV facilities (Canada, USA, Spain).

On June 27, 2014 DataSpace was officially declared to be the first data center in Russia and Continental Europe (and the fifth Tier III data center in the world) to receive the Tier III Operational Sustainability-Gold certification.

Category	Criteria
Staffing and Organization	Staffing Qualifications Organization
Maintenance	Preventive Maintenance Program Housekeeping Maintenance Management System Vendor Support Deferred Maintenance Predictive Maintenance Life-Cycle Planning Failure Analysis Program
Training	Data Center Staff Vendors
Planning, Coordination, and Management	Site Policies Financial Process Reference Library Capacity Management
Operating Conditions	Load Management Operating Set Points
Commissioning	Integrated systems test
Building Characteristics	Purpose-designed and built data center facility Specialized and auxiliary facilities Physical security and access control Adverse factors
Engineering systems and infrastructure	Flexible and gradual ramp-up of capacity Engineering infrastructure that is simple and easy to maintain Ease of maintenance Server racks power and cooling
Risk of natural disasters	Potential natural disasters Disaster mitigation and recovery plan
Risk of man-made disasters	Potential man-made disasters Disaster mitigation and recovery plan

Benefits of Tier III Operational Sustainability-Gold

Tier III Operational Sustainability-Gold certificate is an acknowledgment of highest level of operational excellence at DataSpace1 data center by the Uptime Institute - a global authority on data center operations.
DataSpace operations team has received the highest score under the Uptime Tier III international standards.
Operational procedures that were developed and put in place guarantee the Tier III data center availability.
Operational Sustainability certificate enables the highest degree of mitigation against the risk of human error outage (which account for over 70% of all data center outages).
Emergency plans and procedures ensure rapid response by data center operations team.
Scheduled and corrective maintenance procedures for every system and unit of equipment within the data center help mitigate any risks of equipment-caused outages.