A Rack-Level Cooling Redundancy Metric for Data Center Applications

Redundancy is an important measure of an operation’s ability to withstand planned or unplanned system failures. While this concept is commonly used in power systems, redundancy can be extended to data center cooling systems, as well. We propose a rack-based redundancy metric for cooling performance that is similar in nomenclature to metrics for power systems, but also captures the local nature of data center cooling. This paper will explain how to compute this metric for general data center layouts and show how cooling redundancy can influence design choices when used in combination with typical measures of cooling coverage: inlet temperature and Capture Index.