Digital Twin of a Data Center at an Educational Institution

Abstract

Digital twins are among the most important trends of the fourth industrial revolution. They present a crucial tool for protecting critical mission systems and the development of new services, products, and processes. This paper presents the first digital twin for a data center. The rapid growth of the Internet of things and the areas of modeling and simulation results in high demand for the development of data center digital twins (DCDT) to ensure the safety/protection of critical and costly mission infrastructure and guarantee business continuity, enhance efficiency, and sustain development. This paper presents the design and implementation of a digital twin for a university data center. Different sensory data like temperature, humidity, smoke, and water leakage are analyzed using an intelligent event detection approach, which detects abnormalities using an Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) fed with the minimum ratio between successive real-time data streams. The performance of ELM has outperformed that of both Learning Vector Quantization and Radial Basis Function-based neural network classifiers and proved much faster in abnormal event detection.