J.K.: It has not changed and I think that's attributable to the foresight of its developers. It was never a check list or a design manual, they knew that what was true in the mid-90s would change radically in three years and even more in 20 years. We stick to the performance concepts. When we evaluate a design for a particular Tier the question is, show us how the maintenance opportunities are satisfied, show us how you do the fault tolerance.

We have a certification going on in Oregon right now with the Kyoto wheel (an efficient cooling technology starting to be used in data centers), and in and of itself there's no reason that couldn't be a Tier 3 facility. As these technologies emerge, even for free cooling environments that have little or no mechanical systems, the response is, show us it can work in these conditions.

IDGNS: Why do organizations want to be certified?

J.K.: There are three main circumstances. The team that's responsible for the data center and has been entrusted with this massive amount of money wants to be able to say, "We reached our project goal and here's someone who had no vested interest affirming that for us."

The second main reason is colo providers who are in a highly competitive environment where everyone is claiming a lot of things. They can say, here's an unbiased third party that says we're capable of high availability. It can also shorten their contract cycles because they don't have to redo the due diligence exercise each time, it's been done in the form of our certification.