TIA-942 Design Validation

An important step in ensuring your data center is designed to meet the expectations of your business requirements and performance objectives, is the conducting of Design Validation. A design validation may be undertaken for two reasons: First, to ensure that during the design stages of a data center, the objectives of the design intent are met. Second, a design validation may take place as part of the process of a Facility Certification.

Design Validation at Design Stage

Validating designs during the design stage is also known as a “Peer Review”. This validation should be performed by an independent examiner that may also later serve as the commissioning agent (CxA) for the as-built site. Peer Review (Design Validation) helps to ensure that design intent is met. The reviewing agents examines design objectives, and identifies potential inhibitors, restrictions or impacts to long term operations. This allows the design teams and stakeholders to address and remediate issues while still at design time. Design Validation is a quality assurance checkpoint in the design process.

Design Validation as part of Facility Certification

When Design Validation is a step in the Facility Certification, this step serves to identify potential issues that my prevent achieving the Rating objective. This enables the data center owners and stakeholders to remediate inhibitors to facility as-built certification. It may also help to identify what rating to certify to.

TIA-942 Standard defines four Ratings

Rated 1 – Basic Components (No redundancy, single pathway)

Rated 2 – Redundant Capacity Components (Redundancy of the critical components needed to keep the data center running, also single pathway)

Rated 3 – Concurrent Maintainability (Redundancy of critical components, and redundancy of pathways, with one active and one stand-by)

Rated 4 – Fault Tolerant (Redundant components, redundant pathways, both active – able to sustain loss of any one component or pathway, without loss of the IT Load)

For all of our certification processes, we utilize the global standard ISO 19011 practice for auditing of management systems. Our team of highly qualified auditors and engineers, ensure that you have a clear picture of the capability, reliability and operability expected from your data center, or data center provider.

To read more about Facility Certification, click here:

TIA-942 Facility Certification