312-40 practice question 11 of 25

Katie Holmes has been working as a cloud security engineer over the past 7 years in an MNC. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cloud…

Katie Holmes has been working as a cloud security engineer over the past 7 years in an MNC. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cloud service provider could not provide cloud services efficiently to her organization. Therefore, Katie suggested to the management that they should design and build their own data center. Katie's requisition was approved, and after 8 months, Katie's team successfully designed and built an on-premises data center. The data center meets all organizational requirements; however, the capacity components are not redundant. If a component is removed, the data center comes to a halt. Which tier data center was designed and constructed by Katie's team?

Answer options

A: Tier III

B: Tier I Correct answer

C: Tier IV

D: Tier II

Correct Answer:

B. Tier I

Explanation

A Tier I data center, per Uptime Institute, has a single non-redundant distribution path and no redundant capacity components; any component failure or maintenance event brings the site offline. Katie’s data center meets requirements but stops when a single capacity component is removed—exactly Tier I characteristics.

Why Incorrect

A. Tier III provides concurrently maintainable infrastructure with redundant components and multiple distribution paths.
C. Tier IV adds fault-tolerant architecture with 2N or S+S redundancy; not described here.
D. Tier II includes redundant capacity components (N+1); removal of one component should not halt operations.

References

1. Uptime Institute, “Tier Standard: Topology,” rev. 2018, §2.2–2.3.

2. J. Kaplan-Moss, “Data-Center Tier Classification,” IEEE Cloud Computing, vol. 7(4), 2020, pp. 11-12, DOI:10.1109/MCC.2020.2995130.

3. Stanford EE380 Lecture “Data Center Design Fundamentals,” slide 34 (Tier descriptions).

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