In 2013, Kenneth Brill passed away after a bout with cancer. An electrical engineer by training, with an MBA from Harvard Business School, he was a cantankerous, opinionated visionary known as the “Father of the Data Center Industry.” Before Brill, real estate developers and operators had been defining and measuring data centers in their own, inconsistent ways. But in 1993, he founded the Uptime Institute, which instituted a standard, guiding design for data centers globally. Much like LEED standards for environmental design, the tier standards are used to determine what is available in a facility and how well it works. These tiers offer companies a way to develop better buildings and to measure return on investment and performance.

Tier certifications take two forms — for design documents and for constructed facilities. Tier certification refers to the physical topology of the data centers’ infrastructure that directly affects the computer-room operation. Certificati