Uptime Institute

The Uptime Institute provides education, publications, consulting, certifications, conferences and seminars, independent research, and thought leadership for the enterprise data center industry and for data center professionals. Founded in 1993, the Institute pioneered the creation and facilitation of end-user knowledge communities to improve reliability and uninterruptible availability—uptime—in data center facilities and Information Technology organizations. Today, the 100-plus members of the Institute’s global Site Uptime Networks® are mostly Fortune 100-sized companies having multiple data centers averaging 50,000 square feet of computer room area and consuming six megawatts of utility power. Members learn from each other and from the Institute via closed members-only conferences, site tours, benchmarking programs, best-practice sharing, abnormal incident collection, FLASH Reports, and shared metrics. Institute research focuses on data center facilities, the IT and facilities interface, and how both functions affect the cost, reliability and energy consumption of computing. Institute Best Practices arise out of work with the practitioners who actually run data centers, comparative cost and uptime statistics, consulting work, surveys, and internally funded efforts. The Institute makes this detailed knowledge available to companies within the Networks, and provides high-level summaries for individual Institute members and for the broader data center industry in the form of research papers, webinars, and symposia. These publications and events are vendor-neutral. The Institute has pioneered and continues to develop numerous innovations that subsequently have become industry standards, including hot/cold aisles, site infrastructure energy overhead metrics and measurements, cost modeling, the dual-power specification, and the Tier Classification system for rating the concurrent maintainability and fault tolerance of data center facilities. A recent enhancement to the Tier Classification Standard includes Operational Sustainability, especially critical when data center construction investments exceed $100 million.