ASTRO: An integrated environment for dependability and sustainability evaluation

Sustainability has received great attention by the scientific community, due to concerns for meeting current needs of energy without compromising, for instance, non-renewable resources for future generations. Indeed, the higher demand for energy is an issue that has impacted the way systems are conceived (e.g. data centers), in the sense that designers need to verify several trade-offs and select the feasible solution considering energy utilization and other metrics, such as dependability. Tools are important in this context to automate several design activities and provide results as fast as possible. This paper presents an integrated environment, namely, ASTRO, which contemplates: (i) Reliability Block Diagrams (RBDs), Stochastic Petri Nets (SPN) and continuous-time Markov chains (CTMC) for dependability evaluation; and (ii) a method based on life-cycle assessment (LCA) for quantification of sustainability impact. ASTRO has been conceived to evaluate data center infrastructures, but the environment is generic enough to evaluate general systems. Besides, a real world case study is provided to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed environment. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.