Optimization of electrical infrastructures at data centers through a DoE-based approach

Data centers are critical environments that provide support for a wide range of services and applications, and therefore, there is a demand in order to guarantee high availability and reliability required in these environments. This work proposes a strategy based on models, SLA contracts, maintenance policies and optimization techniques for assessing the cost and availability of electrical infrastructures hosted in data centers. The proposed optimization strategy is based on design of experiments (DoE) and uses the availability importance index in order to detect the equipment that most impacts the system’s availability and, thus, to be able to propose improvements. In addition, a hybrid modeling approach that considers the advantages of stochastic Petri nets and reliability block diagrams is adopted to assess availability. To illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach, two case studies were carried out where significant results were obtained. In the first study, where the performance of the proposed strategy was compared with the brute force algorithm, it was possible to obtain results close to the optimum ones in a fraction of the time. For example, brute force demanded more than 100 minutes to be evaluated, while the proposed strategy took only 6 seconds.