OPTIMIZING DATA CENTER REDUNDANCY USING A MULTIPLE-CRITERIA DECISION MAKING APPROACH

摘要

Globalization and rapid advancement of technology have made businesses highly IT-centric. Hence, continuous IT operations are of critical importance for the proper functioning of business and government organizations. Owners of data centers are required to choose among engineering designs and related capital investments that minimize downtime, maximize reliability, and meet other decision criteria including security, speed and cost.rnThe objective of this paper is to choose among competing data center designs (e.g. Tiers Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ), utilizing multi-attribute analysis (MAA). Specifically, the Analytical Hierarchy process (AHP) is used. A three level AHP model was set up with four attributes and four alternatives. Middle level technology executives were surveyed to determine the weights for the attributes and an analysis of the engineering cases supplied by a world-class engineering design firm (SKANSKA) determined the weights for each alternatives. Finally, the overall scores were calculated to determine which alternative to choose.rnThe paper describes how AHP how could be used to solve a problem in the Engineering Management domain (e.g. how to choose among capital investments in data center redundancy). Directions for future research are provided.