7.1 Introduction

Shared data centers provide a wide variety of services to a large number of customers. The current trend toward service-based computing requires that services be deployed and configured on demand at geographically distributed virtual data centers [2]. There are several problems associated with the management of data center resources: compliance with service level agreements, energy management [1], thermal considerations [3], fault tolerance, security, privacy, and availability. Clearly, cost is the underlying constraint that makes these problems more challenging.

This chapter applies the modeling techniques described in Chapters 10 and 14 to address the issue of properly sizing a data center. This sizing is part of the system design process and focuses on the number of machines and the number and skill level of maintenance personnel to achieve desired levels of availability.