EN 50600 standard

EN 50600 is a series of European standards on data center design, construction and operation that sorts facilities into four availability classes. The EN 50600 series, published by CENELEC (European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization) from 2012 onward, covers what the Uptime Institute classification leaves out: building construction, physical security, cabling, and energy efficiency metrics (part 4-2 defines PUE, Power Usage Effectiveness). Its backbone is the availability class, from 1 to 4, applied separately to power supply (EN 50600-2-2) and environmental control (EN 50600-2-3). Class 1 has a single path with no redundancy; class 4 tolerates a failure even during maintenance, with no single point of failure. ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) adopted it as ISO/IEC 22237, which opens it to tenders outside Europe. The difference with the Tier system comes down first to the business model. Uptime owns its method and issues its own certificates; EN 50600 is a public standard, with conformity attested by third-party bodies such as TÜV, and the bar varies from one auditor to the next. For the risk engineer, a class 3 certificate on power says nothing about cooling, and an operator can advertise the better of the two classes. The certificate has to be read part by part, checking whether it covers the drawings or the built facility. One caveat: the standard describes the architecture and almost nothing of operating discipline, while most serious outages start with human error at a fully redundant site.