A Petri Net-Based Approach to the Quantification of Data Center Dependability

Data center availability and reliability have accomplished greater concern due to increased dependence on Internet services (e.g., Cloud computing paradigm, social networks and e-commerce). For companies that heavily depend on the Internet for their operations, service outages can be very expensive, easily running into millions of dollars per hour [15]. A widely used design principle in fault-tolerance is to introduce redundancy to enhance availability. However, since redundancy leads to additional use of resources and energy, it is expected to have a negative impact on sustainability and the associated cost.