Non-Markovian Modeling of a BladeCenter Chassis Midplane

In distributed contexts such as Cloud computing, the reliability and availability of the provided resources and services have to be assured in order to meet user requirements. At the infrastructure level, this specification is translated into tighter ones on the datacenter hosting physical resources. In this paper, starting from a real case study of the IBM BladeCenter, we provide a technique for the quantitative evaluation of datacenter infrastructure availability. The proposed technique allows one to take into account both aging phenomena and multiple operating conditions. In particular, one subsystem of the BladeCenter, the chassis midplane, is studied. Indeed, based on the stochastic characterization of the midplane reliability through statistic measurements, a model dealing with the non-exponential failure time distribution thus obtained is evaluated to demonstrate the suitability and the effectiveness of the proposed technique.