Les Suzukamo (a buddy of mine) wrote an article about data center outsourcing in last Sunday’s Pioneer Press that you might find interesting.

But he got beat up by a reader for the following sentence — “Tier 1 is considered the Rolls Royce category of data centers. ” The reader pointed out that Tier IV is the best, and that Les had gotten his ranking backwards. When Les asked me this afternoon, I gave him the consultant’s answer — “it depends.” In this case it depends on who you talk to. Us network geeks tend to think in terms of Tier 1 carriers — and thus their data centers are considered Tier 1 data centers (or, telco-class data centers).

But data center infrastructure geeks indeed do have a different hierarchy, and by those lights Les’s reader is right — Tier IV is the best. I pushed this white paper along to Les by way of backup.

Dang, that’s confusing…