Placement of High Availability Geo-Distributed Data Centers in Emerging
Economies
Abstract
The data center markets in emerging economies are being built at a
furious pace. When high availability is required, as it always is in the
modern digital economy, the placement of geo-distributed data centers
may be influenced by factors such as technician shortage and
under-developed infrastructure, both of which are typical in emerging
economies. Although the data center availability subject in general has
been well studied, it remains unclear how rapid and unbalanced economic
development in emerging economies may affect the availability of
geo-distributed data centers and their cost of ownership. In this paper,
we incorporate the unbalanced availability of infrastructure and
technician into the data center placement. The problem is first
formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear program (MINLP).To solve this
potentially large scale problem, we transform it into a QCQP, capable of
handling heterogeneous workloads. The resulting problem can then be
efficiently solved by off-the-shelf optimization toolboxes. With
real-life data in China, we show how unbalanced development of
infrastructure and technician shortage may affect the placement of data
centers, and analyze the tradeoff between cost and availability. Our
results indicate that technician shortage and unbalanced network
infrastructure will lead to increased cost and distinct data center
placement strategies.