Novel tier reclassification architecture for non–terrestrial data centre systems

Data centres play an important role in hosting and enabling content access in wireless communication networks and computing applications. The use of data centres is accompanied with high operational costs due to the necessity of powering and cooling. In addition, data centres are mostly terrestrial facilities with different performance levels influenced by the data centre tier rating. The need to reduce operational costs has prompted the siting of data centres in non–terrestrial locations such as the ocean and stratosphere with free cooling benefits. The location of future data centres raises new challenges such as reclassifying data centre Tiers. The Tier re-classification challenge should be addressed to identify factors that influence the performance of non-terrestrial data centres. This paper addresses the challenge of designing tier classification architecture for non-terrestrial data centre systems. In this paper, primary and secondary criteria required for the Tier classification of ocean and stratosphere data centres are identified. The proposed tier re–classification architecture is also compared with the Tier 5 data centre standard recently proposed for terrestrial data centres.