The Effects of Temperature Variation on Data Center IT Systems

Data centers are constantly growing in order to meet the demands of new technologies such as cloud computing and e-commerce. In such paradigms, periods of downtime can lead to financial losses of millions of dollars and permanently damage a company´s reputation. Several factors affect the availability of IT systems in data centers, among them temperature variations within the data center room. This paper proposes an approach for evaluating the effect of such temperature changes on data center IT systems. In this approach, the evaluation is accomplished with stochastic Petri net (SPN) models which simulate the impact of temperature on the availability of variously specified IT and cooling architectures. A case study is included to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed models.