AutoDC

Number of data centers continues to grow

As our economy and lifestyles are increasingly data-driven, the significance and number of data centers continues to grow. The way in which the centres are operated and maintained becomes an important question.

Automation lower costs

Automation will lower operation costs, which will be a key market enabler, and allow data centers to be situated in regions lacking competent maintenance staff. In addition, automation is important also from the perspective of security and availability. The AutoDC project aims to create an innovative design framework for data centres, which are designed to operate for many years without human interaction. The automated data centres are envisioned to be able continue their operation and to heal themselves in the face of contextual interferences, such as intermittent power failures or overheating.

AutoDC enables self-optimazation, self-configuration and self-repairing mechanisms

Data centre automation requires endeavoring beyond the state-of-the-art in several areas together enabling the self-optimization, self-configuration and self-repairing mechanisms. The project will a) define the underlying business values and sustainability targets, b) develop powerful engines and

systems capable of handling a vast amount of monitoring data necessary for the automated operations, c) creating a decision support system utilizing e.g. prescriptive analytics and machine learning to guide the automated operations, d) develop AI and model-based algorithms that are able to detect faults and anomalies and thereby be able to take automated actions preventing failures, and e) create control loops necessary for controlling the entity formed by the technical and physical aspects of an automated data centers.

The AutoDC project is lead by Ericsson, Sweden. The consortium consists of high-level industry partners and research from Finland, Sweden and Canada. The work of the Finnish consortium is coordinated by Aalto University and includes SME-partners Granlund, KW-Set and Orbis. AutoDC has secured the highly sought after EUREKA ITEA 3 label. Business Finland is the co-funding body of Finnish EUREKA participants.