TY - JOUR AU - Moises Levy AU - Daniel Raviv TI - An Overview of Data Center Metrics and a Novel Approach for a New Family of Metrics JO - Advances in Science, Technology and Engineering Systems Journal PY - 2018 VL - 3 IS - 2 SP - 238 EP - 251 DO - 10.25046/aj030228 UR - https://www.astesj.com/v03/i02/p28/ L1 - https://www.astesj.com/?sdm_process_download=1&download_id=4029 AB -

Data centers’ mission critical nature, significant power consumption, and increasing reliance on them for digital information, have created an urgent need to monitor and adequately manage these facilities. Metrics are a key part of this effort as their indicators raise flags that lead to optimization of resource utilization. A thorough review of existing data center metrics presented in this paper shows that while existing metrics are valuable, they overlook important aspects. New metrics should enable a holistic understanding of the data center behavior. This paper proposes a novel framework using a multidimensional approach for a new family of data center metrics. Performance is examined across four different sub-dimensions: productivity, efficiency, sustainability, and operations. Risk associated with each of those sub-dimensions is contemplated. External risks are introduced, namely site risk, as another dimension of the metrics, and makes reference to a methodology that explains how it is calculated. Results from metrics across all sub-dimensions can be normalized to the same scale and incorporated in one graph, which simplifies visualization and reporting. The new family of data center metrics can help to standardize a process that evolves into a best practice to help evaluate data centers, to compare them to each other, and to improve the decision-making process.

KW - Data center KW - Mission critical KW - Metric KW - Measurement KW - Performance KW - Efficiency KW - Productivity KW - Sustainability KW - Operations KW - Infrastructure KW - Management KW - Risk KW - Site ER -