Monthly Archive

Here’s a cool new animation of VISI’s new Eden Prairie data center facility.

I attended the annual CIO Panel organized by the Minnesota High Tech Association this morning.  The CIO Panel attracts CIO’s and technical leaders from a broad array of industries around the Twin Cities area.  I had the opportunity to welcome the participants at the event because VISI was the official sponsor.  During my speech we played a new 3-D animated video showing the key design elements of our new Tier III Eden Prairie, MN data center facility.

Later in the day I participated in a webinar sponsored by VISI and the Uptime Institute titled “Why Data Center Tiers Matter”. I learned some interesting facts about the Uptime Institute’s data center certification process that I hadn’t heard before.  Did you know that there are currently less than 50 Tier III certified data centers in the world?  And less than 6 Tier IV data centers?

VISI is the first service provider to build a certified Tier III data center in the state of Minnesota.  We are not the first company to build a Tier III data center in the state. A few companies (Target, United Health Group) have built Tier III data centers for their own private use.  But VISI’s data center was built for “public” consumption.  If you are willing to pay the price you can now lease a slice of a Tier III data center in Minnesota.

Tier III data centers matter to businesses that have to be running 24×7 with almost zero downtime.  These businesses can’t afford to shutdown their services for maintenance or facility upgrades. Tier III data centers are 2-3 times more expensive to build than Tier II facilities due to all the redundant infrastructure involved.