Quantifying the sustainability impact of data center availability

Data center availability is critical considering the explosive growth in Internet services and people's dependence on them. Furthermore, in recent years, sustainability has become important. However, data center designers have little information on the sustainability impact of data center availability architectures. In this paper, we present an approach to estimate the sustainability impact of such architectures. Availability is computed using Stochastic Petri Net (SPN) models while an exergy-based lifecycle assessment (LCA) approach is used for quantifying sustainability impact. The approach is demonstrated on real life data center power infrastructure architectures. Five different architectures are considered and initial results show that quantification of sustainability impact provides important information to a data center designer in evaluating availability architecture choices.

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