Fear Assessment: Why data center servers should be turned off

摘要

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the extra costs incurred by maintaining all the machines of a data center executing continuously for the fear of damaging hardware, degradating service or losing data. In order to demonstrate this, an objective function which minimizes energy consumption depending on the number of times that the machines are switched on/off is provided. Finally we demonstrate that no matter how afraid of damaging hardware an administrator is, it is always a better option to turn off machines in order to reduce costs.