Reliability of Example Mechanical Systems for Data Center Cooling Selected by Tier Classification

This is the second paper of a series on data center design. The first paper "Reliability of Example Data Center Designs Selected by Tier Classifications," presented at the 2010 I&CPS Conference addressed electrical designs. This paper will discuss the reliability of the mechanical cooling systems that would be required for data centers with similar designs to the examples used in the previous paper. The review of the metrics of reliability engineering from the first paper will also be included. The data center industry has come to rely on "tier classifications" as presented in a number of papers by the Uptime Institute as a gradient scale of data center configurations and requirements from least (Tier 1) to most reliable (Tier IV). This paper will apply the principles and modeling techniques of reliability engineering to specific examples that were selected based on gradient scale provided by the Tier Classifications and discuss the results.