Towards realizing a low cost and highly available datacenter power infrastructure

Realizing highly available datacenter power infrastructure is an extremely expensive proposition with costs more than doubling as we move from three 9's (Tier-1) to six 9's (Tier-4) of availability. Existing approaches only consider the cost/availability trade-off for a restricted set of power infrastructure configurations, relying mainly on component redundancy. A number of additional knobs such as centralized vs. distributed component placement and power-feed interconnect topology also exist, whose impact has only been studied in limited forms. In this paper, we develop detailed datacenter availability models using Continuous-time Markov Chains and Reliability Block Diagrams to quantify the cost-availability trade-off offered by these power infrastructure knobs.