If you count the hottest outlets in the technology circle in the first half of 2022, you will definitely be on the list. At the beginning of 2022, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other four ministries and commissions have determined the construction of the "East and West" project. Ten data center clusters were established in eight places including Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area to complete the overall layout and design of the national integrated data center system. The intensive data center construction has since kicked off. .

The establishment of the Eastern Digital and Western Computing Project stems from the adjustment of the supply and demand of computing power and energy in the eastern and western regions. The developed regions in the east have strong demand for data and computing power, but the computing power facilities for processing data and the energy supply have been developed in the east, where every inch of land is expensive. Cost and energy constraints. The western region is rich in land, energy and other resources. The clustered and centralized planning and development of data centers in the western region can optimize the spatial layout of the data center and effectively utilize the renewable energy in the western region to promote the green, low-carbon and high-quality development of the data center.

As the core resource of the digital economy era, the demand for computing power is driving the rapid deployment of data centers. However, large data centers that run 24 hours a day are also big energy consumers. Data from research institutions shows that in the past ten years, the overall electricity consumption of data centers in my country has increased by more than 10% per year. According to IDC, by 2024, the power consumption of data centers will account for more than 5% of the power consumption of the whole society.

Under the requirements of the dual-carbon strategy, the data centers of large energy consumers have also been "taken care of" by the government. In the Eastern Digital and Western Computing project, the construction standards for data centers are becoming more and more strict, and low-carbon energy saving is emphasized, and the requirements for the PUE value of data centers are also getting higher and higher. ​

The PUE Mission of the Data Center

The PUE value specifically refers to a value of the data center's energy consumption standard, which is the ratio of all the energy consumed by the data center to the energy consumed by IT equipment. In simple terms, the closer the PUE value is to 1, the better the degree of energy conservation and emission reduction, and the larger the PUE value, the greater the power consumption of supporting infrastructure such as cooling and power supply.

Under the requirements of sustainable development, the central and local governments have repeatedly proposed energy-saving and carbon-reducing transformation for high-energy-consuming industries. As a traditional large energy consumer, data centers have been listed in key areas for many times, and have put forward clear transformation requirements.

In February 2019, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Guiding Opinions on Strengthening the Construction of Green Data Centers", which stipulates that by 2022, the average energy consumption of data centers will basically reach the international advanced level, and the PUE of new large and ultra-large data centers will drop below 1.4.

In July 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Three-Year Action Plan for the Development of New Data Centers (2021-2023)". In view of the high energy consumption of data centers, it is required to steadily improve the energy efficiency level of new data centers, gradually reduce PUE, and use renewable energy. rate gradually increased. This time, the PUE of Zhangjiakou, Shaoguan, Yangtze River Delta, Wuhu, Tianfu, and Chongqing clusters is required to be below 1.25, and the PUE of Linger, Gui'an, Zhongwei, and Qingyang clusters is required to be below 1.2.

The construction of data centers is both an outlet and an opportunity, but both new and old data centers have high requirements for PUE, which is a big challenge for the green reform of data centers. In foreign countries, the PUE value of advanced data centers is less than 2. The PUE value of domestic data centers is between 2 and 3, which is twice the average value of global advanced data centers.

Most of the old data centers that persist in the country are built by major enterprises to meet their own business needs. In summary, the characteristics of these data centers are mainly fragmented and extensive construction. The scale of the data center is huge, and there are a large number of Servers, storage devices, and switches consume a lot of energy during their own operation. In addition, infrastructure such as computer rooms and air conditioners are outdated, and the energy consumption of data centers has been running at a high level. This also makes the data center criticized by the industry for a long time, which directly affects the healthy development of the data center.

For newly built data centers, the problems they face are similar. The data center itself consumes huge amounts of energy, and the corresponding technologies for reducing energy consumption are still in the growing stage, with high costs and unstable effects. Under the background of the dual carbon strategy, the PUE value of the data center green demand is less than 1.3, which is a big challenge for IDC manufacturers. How to reduce the energy consumption of the data center? Let the PUE value get closer and closer to 1? Emerging technologies and solutions are emerging.

Double carbon in every direction: IDC green reform measures

According to research statistics, the energy consumption of data centers mainly includes IT equipment, cooling systems, power supply and distribution systems, lighting systems and other facilities, such as security equipment, sensors and related data center building management systems. On the whole, the power consumption of the IT equipment system composed of servers, storage and network communication equipment accounts for about 45% of the total power consumption of the data center, and the power consumption of the air conditioning and refrigeration system accounts for about 45% of the total power consumption of the data center. 40% of the power supply and other equipment account for 10% to 15%.

If the data center is measured from the index of low PUE, an excellent low-energy data center has high requirements on reducing energy consumption in the whole life cycle from planning and design, to procurement and implementation, to operation, maintenance and verification. For data centers with low PUE, innovative technologies and services need to be embedded in these links to reduce the PUE value of the data center.

1. Reduce the power consumption of IT equipment. The method adopted by the industry mainly reduces power consumption from the software and hardware level of IT equipment. In terms of IT infrastructure, overall optimization is carried out from application optimization, architecture planning/optimization, and product selection to balance consumption reduction and efficiency. For example, AI technology is used for time-sharing scheduling of data, intelligent forecasting, and reasonable expansion of server equipment. and scaling, optimize the allocation of computing resources, and improve server utilization.

2. The power consumption of the refrigeration system is reduced. The traditional air cooling technology is gradually replaced by the liquid cooling technology, and the cooling effect of the liquid cooling technology is almost double that of the traditional air cooling. At present, technologies such as plate liquid cooling and immersion liquid cooling are gradually being applied. The plate type liquid cooling technology has a small amount of transformation, and the layout is basically the same as that of an ordinary computer room. The submerged liquid cooling can provide a cooling technology design that combines "liquid cooling + air cooling", and the core module components can be differentiated in a targeted manner. The waste heat recovery of liquid cooling, such as heating, secondary refrigeration, power generation and other industries is also becoming a research trend and hot spot.

3. The power consumption of construction, operation and maintenance systems is reduced. At the beginning of the data center construction, low-PUE planning and design are carried out, starting from comprehensive site selection, low-energy cabinets, modular/micro-modules, and operation and maintenance management to balance the relationship between consumption reduction and cost; in terms of operation and maintenance management, through Refinement monitoring platform, reasonable evaluation of resource applications, etc., detect resource utilization to dynamically adjust resource allocation, shut down unnecessary equipment in low energy consumption periods and other strategies to balance consumption reduction and efficiency issues.

We can find that the reduction of green energy consumption of data centers starts from planning and construction, including the green design of power supply systems, air conditioning systems, and HVAC systems, and the application of liquid cooling technology in refrigeration systems; and then to gateways and servers at the IT equipment level. The selection of IT equipment, network construction, and intelligent energy-saving optimization of the application process; the operation and maintenance management involves the monitoring of IT equipment and platforms, applications and services.

The measurement of the energy consumption of the PUE indicator of the data center is a systematic project. In these key dimensions, each item cannot be dropped, especially for newly built data centers, otherwise the PUE value will be closed. stop situation. For IDC manufacturers, the reduction of energy consumption and the improvement of energy efficiency are the indicators they are most concerned about.

Competitive "trump card": one-stop full-life service

How to adapt new and old data centers to high PUE value requirements is the core business of IDC manufacturers, and it is also the goal of their key development and innovation.

The construction, operation and maintenance, service and other stages of the data center contain complex content systems, and the professional fields involved are complex, such as the supporting civil construction of the computer room for building system construction, the power supply, cooling, cabinets, wiring, etc. of the physical infrastructure of the data center. Operating systems, network equipment, software and hardware platforms, etc. Therefore, the role of service providers in data centers is relatively scattered, providing differentiated services at different stages of data center construction and operation.

In the data center industry chain, it is mainly divided into three service provider roles: infrastructure, IDC hosting, and IDC services. The upstream includes enterprises that provide IT equipment servers, software and hardware facilities, as well as some IDC manufacturers that provide supporting equipment such as network communications, power supplies, racks, and heat dissipation. Such as Huawei, Tsinghua Unigroup and other companies.

The midstream is an IDC service and solution provider. The market is dominated by three major operators, coexisting and developing with third-party IDC companies and cloud service providers, mainly from GDS and 21Vianet. The downstream is the demand side of data centers. It is mainly based on cloud computing vendors from major Internet companies, such as Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Huawei Cloud.

We are familiar with the technology circle in the data center market mainly as upstream and downstream players. The upstream IDC vendors of the data center mostly exist in the service role of single-point capability, and provide some services in the construction and operation and maintenance of the data center. For example, consulting services for data center construction, refrigeration system construction, power system, IT software and hardware equipment services, etc.

Now more and more IDC manufacturers in the industry are starting to focus on technology and modular solutions, playing the "trump card" of one-stop service data center construction. One-stop service includes data center services from infrastructure construction, operation and maintenance, management and other life fields, such as infrastructure construction, IT equipment hardware and software, low-energy cabinets, network gateway services, refrigeration systems, platform operation and maintenance system services Wait.

In the IDC industry, manufacturers under the banner of one-stop service have begun to increase. After all, the scattered services of data centers are only a small part. One-stop service means a package of solutions, which contains huge commercial value, especially the future follow-up operation of the data center. This is the focus of the blue ocean and competition for participating manufacturers in the IDC market in the future, and it is also the focus of IDC manufacturers such as Huawei and H3C. Reasons for construction and investment.

On the whole, one-stop service requires high technology and capabilities of manufacturers, and there are few manufacturers in the industry that have one-stop full-life field service capabilities. In the construction and operation and maintenance of data centers, there are many sub-fields involved. In the long industry chain, there are all-round players and specialized players. Everyone can play their own strengths. The key to staying at the poker table for a long time is to create A powerful tool or an energy-efficient solution.

In the era of intelligence, entrenched in large and small data centers across the country, there are countless small and trivial needs, requiring all kinds of players in the industry to exert their strengths. The pie of the IDC industry is huge, and it requires the joint efforts of many parties to deepen the green reform. This development opportunity is equal to all participants.

The innovation and transformation of IDC service providers in data centers has continuously empowered data centers with large energy consumption with more green services and operation and maintenance capabilities, and accelerated the development of data centers toward an efficient, clean, intensive, and sustainable green road, which not only supports our digital The greening of life also contributes to the rapid realization of the double-carbon goal.