Enterprise data centers are provisioned with conservative redundancies built into their power infrastructures to handle failures. Conservative over-provisioning of power capacity for availability reasons results in significant capital investment for large enterprises because this capacity is designed for failure conditions that do not happen often. On the other hand, underprovisioning this capacity runs the risk of affecting the performance of the data center when failures do happen, through

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... her service unavailability or degraded service performance. Hence, there are interactions and tradeoffs between power capacity utilization, power redundancy, and data center performance that is often overlooked. Our work proposes a provisioning methodology for the power delivery infrastructure called power availability provisioning that addresses this challenge. We provide observations on power infrastructure design based on industry experience operating large data centers. We characterize power availability events, motivate the need for workload-driven power availability provisioning, and describe a methodology to estimate performance impact due to power availability events. We then present an unconventional redundancy technique (N-M redundancy) that proposes reducing redundant power equipment, leveraging observations from our study.