Reliability Analysis of Internal Power Supply Architecture of Data Centers in Terms of Power Losses

Abstract

The number of data centers and the energy demand are increasing globally with the development of information and communication technology (ICT). The data center operators are facing challenges to limit the internal power losses and the unexpected outages of the computational resources or servers. The power losses of the internal power supply system (IPSS) increase with the increasing number of servers that causes power supply capacity shortage for the devices in IPSS. The aim of this paper is to address the outage probability of the computational resources or servers due to the power supply capacity shortage of the power distribution units (PDUs) in the IPSS. The servers outage probability at rack-level defines the service availability of the data center since the servers are the main computational resource of it. The overall availability of the IPSS and the power consumption models of the IPSS devices are also presented in this paper. Quantitative studies are performed to show the impacts of the power losses on the service availability and the overall availability of the IPSS for two different IPSS architectures, which are equivalent to the Tier I and Tier IV models of the data center.