Data center rating system perhaps not the best indicator of well-run clouds

The Uptime Institute says some data centers are playing games with their “tiering” system for rating data center reliability.  Indeed, they believe many are making false claims, or spinning like a top when it comes to the assessment.

The Institute states that some companies may be running enterprise-critical  applications, or perhaps hosting private or public cloud services, in data centers that are more susceptible to failure than advertised.  Therefore, they may get a big surprise the next time there is a weather or power event, or both at the same time.

Customers can be misled in a variety of ways, including data centers implying that they are “uptime certified” when they’re not.  Vendors are expected to follow that up with a “constructed facility” certification to verify the data center was built to spec, but many never do.

This does not surprise me, given the checkups that fail to occur around these ratings, either by the cloud providers that are leveraging these data centers to host their services, or by those who consume the cloud services.  So, everyone assumes a certain degree of service when it’s just not there.

I suspect that a few well-placed lawsuits around the cost of outages will bring some of these data center providers around.  Figure the cloud users will sue the cloud provider, who will ultimately go after the data center provider.  Unfortunately, there must be consequences before action will be taken.

 

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David S. Linthicum

SVP Cloud Technology Partners

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