Dependability evaluation and sensitivity analysis of data center cooling systems

Over the years, data centers have been evolving to meet the new demands of cloud computing platforms, e-commerce, social networking services, and big data. These large data centers must meet various dependability requirements to guarantee the quality of service at a high level of reliability and availability, reducing interoperability time, as this is a major competitive factor for companies. The cooling system plays an important role in the availability of data centers. It is responsible for keeping the IT system at a suitable temperature to avoid hardware and software failures since operating at high temperatures negatively impacts the reliability of the electronic components. This paper investigates reliability and availability metrics and performs parametric sensitivity analysis for data center cooling systems. Our approach is based on modeling reliability block diagrams and the sensitivity analysis technique; the last is to assess how sensitive the availability is about model component failure and repair times.