Estimating reliability importance and total cost of acquisition for data center power infrastructures

The number and size of data centers have greatly increased in recent years, mainly, due to the explosive growth of Internet services, such as those based on cloud computing paradigm. Therefore, service providers have intensified efforts on improving the quality of services while minimizing the costs of data centers, for instance, those associated to out-of-services periods. In other words, robust data center infrastructures are necessary, such that dependability requirements are satisfied while simultaneously incurring costs as minimal as possible. This paper proposes an approach that combines reliability importance indexes with TCA (Total Cost of Acquisition) to evaluate data center power infrastructures. The proposed approach aims at indicating the benefits and drawbacks of different architectures for power infrastructures to guide the decision maker in evaluating the most appropriate design.