Comparison of Electrical Architectures for Support of the Software Defined Data Centers

This paper addresses the reliability and availability of electrical architectures used in modern data centers. As software defined data centers (SDDC) are gaining wider acceptance, it is expected from the electrical infrastructure to support it by following high standards in terms of reliability and availability. In this paper, reliability and availability of low voltage electrical architectures based on AC UPS approaches are compared to 400V and 12V DC based systems when implemented in SDDC environment. The comparison is made for several different centralized and distributed topologies and includes traditional approaches as well as novel approaches to creation of electrical architectures that would support SDDC paradigm. Results of this comparison are derived from reliability modeling approach using the Dynamic Fault Tree Analysis (DFTA).