A new approach to predict fan failures with fan speed correlation
Cong Li, Abishai Daniel, Nishi Ahuja · 2016
When aging fans in server chassis wear out, they slow down and circulate less air, eventually causing overheating condition and unexpected thermal shutdown. We propose a novel approach to predictive analysis of fan failures before the significant wear-out or slow-down by modeling the correlation of the speed measurements of multiple fans. We present the empirical result that the speed measurements of multiple fans in a server are highly correlated and exploit the observation to devise the use of data-driven anomaly detection methods in predictive fan failure analysis. A comparative study on several variants of the approach is performed on the simulated data sets demonstrating how certain heuristics substantially improve the performance.