  When will a server fail catastrophically in an industrial datacenter? Is it
possible to forecast these failures so preventive actions can be taken to
increase the reliability of a datacenter? To answer these questions, we have
studied what are probably the largest, publicly available datacenter traces,
containing more than 104 million events from 12,500 machines. Among these
samples, we observe and categorize three types of machine failures, all of
which are catastrophic and may lead to information loss, or even worse,
reliability degradation of a datacenter. We further propose a two-stage
framework-DC-Prophet-based on One-Class Support Vector Machine and Random
Forest. DC-Prophet extracts surprising patterns and accurately predicts the
next failure of a machine. Experimental results show that DC-Prophet achieves
an AUC of 0.93 in predicting the next machine failure, and a F3-score of 0.88
(out of 1). On average, DC-Prophet outperforms other classical machine learning
methods by 39.45% in F3-score.
