Framework and architecture to assess viability of rain cloud platform cooling

Data center cooling constitutes a significant overhead in existing terrestrial cloud data centres and platforms. This paper addresses the challenges arising from the necessity of cooling data centres by leveraging on environment friendly free-cooling. It proposes the post-hydrometeor cooling effect for temperature reduction in data centres. The post-hydrometeor cooling effect considers the effect of long duration hydrometeor showers on data center cooling. In leveraging the post-hydrometeor cooling effect, the paper proposes a novel weather station diversity architecture and data analytic framework The weather station diversity architecture enables the acquisition of climate data. This enables the suitability of a given geographical region for hosting data centres that leverage on the post - hydrometeor cooling effect to be investigated. In addition, a data analytic framework is proposed. The data analytic framework presents algorithms that enable the decision making process as regards determining the suitability of a given location. In addition, performance evaluation shows that the cooling cost is reduced by up to 25% and by a minimum of 8.35% on average when the proposed hydrometeor cooling effect is incorporated in data center cooling.