Ken Brill, the Man Who Defined the Data Center, Dies 40
dcblogs writes "The founder of the UpTime Institute, Kenneth G. Brill, 69, died Tuesday, the institute's parent company announced. Brill, an electrical engineer by training, is credited with playing an enormous role in shaping the modern data center industry. 'He singled-handedly crafted an industry out of nothing,' said Mike Manos, the chief technology officer at AOL, who had known Brill since the late 1990s. Until Brill's efforts, enterprises had been defining and measuring data centers in their own way, said Manos. 'There was no commonality.' Today, 'you can't go anywhere in the world without people talking about tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 data centers — it's that fundamental,' he said. In 2011, following Amazon's prolong outage, Brill warned that the perceived reliability of large cloud providers was going to lead to problems. 'There will always be an advocate for how it can be done cheaper, [but] if you haven't had a failure for five years — who is the advocate for reliability?' said Brill. 'My prediction is that in the years ahead, we will see more failures than we have been seeing, because people have forgotten what we had to do to get to where we are.'"
Re:people talk about "tier X" datacenters, but dif (Score:5, Informative)
on what each tier means.
This is a case where there are too many different standards, all using the same terms.
In any case, administrative processes are going to affect uptime numbers far more than simple infrastructure redundancy
remember that Google (who has some of the best uptime around) doesn't bother with dual power for it's servers, so it could not be more than a lowly tier 2 datacenter per some standards.
The actual standards define availability redundancy and concurrency of systems, not of individual devices. When your systems are composed of multiple independent devices, it affects what is looked at accordingly.