An analytical framework for estimating TCO and exploring data center design space

In this paper, we present EETCO: an estimation and exploration tool that provides qualitative assessment of data center design decisions on Total-Cost-of-Ownership (TCO) and environmental impact. It can capture the implications of many parameters including server performance, power, cost, and Mean-Time-To-Failure (MTTF). The tool includes a model for spare estimation needed to account for server failures and performance variability. The paper describes the tool model and its implementation, and presents experiments that explore tradeoffs offered by different server configurations, performance variability, MTTF, 2D vs 3D-stacked processors, and ambient temperature. These experiments reveal, for the data center configurations used in this study, several opportunities for profit and optimization in the datacenter ecosystem: (i) servers with different computing performance and power consumption merit exploration to minimize TCO and the environmental impact, (ii) performance variability is desirable if it comes with a drastic cost reduction, (iii) shorter processor MTTF is beneficial if it comes with a moderate processor cost reduction, (iv) increasing by few degrees the ambient datacenter temperature reduces the environmental impact with a minor increase in the TCO and (v) a higher cost for a 3D-stacked processor with shorter MTTF and higher power consumption can be preferred, over a conventional 2D processor, if it offers a moderate performance increase.