Reliability Assessment of the Configuration of Dynamic Uninterruptible Power Sources: A Case of Data Centers

Abstract

The number of data centers worldwide is increasing year by year, mostly because of the development of cloud services and applications. In the near future, the rate of construction of data centers will grow, with a corresponding increase in their electrical energy consumption. The requirements of the reliability of the electrical power supply of data centers are one of the highest among industrial power consumers, since uninterrupted power supply is critically important for the continuous functioning of server hardware. The assessment of electrical power supply reliability is one of the most important parts of the design process of data centers. However, the speed of the development of new power equipment does not always make it possible to use classical probabilistic and statistical methods for reliability assessment. Therefore, the development of new methods for reliability assessment based on alternative approaches, which can eliminate the disadvantages of probabilistic and statistical methods, are of great interest. This paper discusses the alternative method for analyzing the reliability of electrical power supply for the case of data centers. The method defines the reliability through the internal information of the system that characterizes the system’s topology, flows of information, energy, and matter in the system.