Backup, Disaster Recovery, Public Clouds, and Data Center Tiers
Got a question earlier today about the Unitrends Vault2Cloud disaster recovery service (which works with our all-in-one backup and archiving appliances) and what tier data center we’re using. This made me realize that I hadn’t done a good job of communicating that information. When I talked to some folks in our sales and support organization, I also realized that there was a bit of a disconnect in terms of data center tiers. So I decided to write a short post on this subject.
The “tier” of a data center is a standardized methodology used to define the uptime of a data center. Here are the tier definitions:
- Tier 1 = Non-redundant capacity components (single uplink and servers).
- Tier 2 = Tier 1 + Redundant capacity components.
- Tier 3 = Tier 1 + Tier 2 + Dual-powered equipments and multiple uplinks.
- Tier 4 = Tier 1 + Tier 2 + Tier 3 + all components are fully fault-tolerant including uplinks, storage, chillers, HVAC systems, servers etc. Everything is dual-powered.
Vault2Cloud’s infrastructure is SAS 70 Tier 3.
