Exclusive Observation | In the data center industry, have you had a good year?
The past year was the year when the concept of "computing power" rose, and the first year when the "East Counting and West Counting" project was fully launched. In this year, as the computing infrastructure and the cornerstone of the digital economy, the data center was at the forefront of development, but also faced unprecedented changes and challenges.
In this year, different regions and enterprises faced different development environments and challenges. China's IDC circle hopes to conduct a close observation and interview on the development of the industry at such a time point at the end of the year, listen to the voice of front-line enterprises, and grasp the real pulse of the industry.
For this reason, we produced the special topic "IDC Circle Exclusive Observation | In the Data Center Industry, Did You Have a Good Year?", and invited many industry experts and enterprise executives in the IDC industry to participate in it, to dig deeply into the industry status quo and analyze the industry development trend.
New refrigeration technology promotes "carbon neutrality" in the industry
Lu Xiaoyang, Bohao Data: "With the promotion of national and local policies, the application of liquid cooling technology in the data center will also achieve considerable development."
In recent years, under the overall environment of "carbon neutrality" of the whole industry, the data center industry, as a high energy carrying industry, has also ushered in the wave of "carbon reduction" for all employees. Zhan Dongdong, Director of Data Science and Innovation of China Enterprise Communications, said that at this stage, many places have proposed that the PUE of new data centers should not be higher than 1.3, which has raised higher requirements for the entire IDC industry chain. "In the past, IDC service providers may pay more attention to the requirements after the completion and operation of the data center. Now, these IDC service provider partners have gradually made a new transformation - in the process of building the data center, they have begun to consider whether the process materials and equipment used meet the relevant specifications in terms of energy consumption and green energy conservation. " Zhan Dongdong pointed out that.
In the context of the industry's increasingly high demand for energy saving in data centers, new generation data center refrigeration technologies such as liquid cooling, indirect evaporative cooling, etc. are widely used in data centers.
Lv Xiaoyang, CTO of Bohao Data, pointed out in an interview that liquid cooling technology can directly use natural cooling to significantly reduce power consumption, which is conducive to reducing carbon emissions in the data center. In addition, cloud computing, big data, 5G network construction has brought high-throughput computing services such as 5G interactive augmented reality (AR), Tianliang data processing, which has seriously challenged the heat dissipation of server chips, and the temperature of chip thermal packaging shell is also increasing, reaching the limit of air-cooled heat dissipation. The specific heat capacity of liquid is 1000~3500 times that of air, and the thermal conductivity is 15~25 times that of air. Therefore, liquid cooling with larger heat capacity and faster heat conduction is the best choice for heat dissipation with higher heat density. With the promotion of national and local policies, the application of liquid cooling technology in the data center will also make great progress.
Energy storage+IDC The time has come
Zhan Dongdong of China Enterprise Communications: "The energy storage+IDC model needs intelligent solutions to achieve the" digital intelligence "transformation of the data center."
In addition to the increasing application of new refrigeration technologies in data centers, increasing the proportion of renewable energy applications will also become the focus of the industry in 2022.
The 14th Five Year Digital Economy Development Plan issued by the State Council clearly pointed out that the utilization level of renewable energy in the data center should be continuously improved. The local government also actively responded to the national call by issuing relevant policy documents to promote the application of renewable energy in the data center.
In the second half of 2022, the Department of Industry and Information Technology of Shandong Province issued several measures on deepening reform and innovation to promote high-quality development of the digital economy. The document pointed out that the construction of "wind and solar energy storage+big data center" was started, and the proportion of renewable energy used in the data center increased by 10 percentage points to more than 25%;
The Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region issued the Implementation Plan for Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region to Implement the Carbon Peak and Carbon Neutralization Target and Promote the Green and High Quality Development of New Infrastructure such as Data Center and 5G, which pointed out that by 2025, the renewable energy utilization rate in Ningxia hub area will reach 60%, and that in China Health Data Center cluster will reach 65%. The large-scale application of renewable energy in data centers has become a general trend.
As the best choice to solve the unstable "shortcomings" of renewable energy, energy storage has attracted the attention of the industry in the past 2022. It seems that "energy storage+IDC" has become one of the mandatory options for future data centers.
Looking back over the past few years, many IDC service providers, such as Wanguo Data, 21Vianet and Bohao Data, have also focused on the exploration of the energy storage+IDC model.
Bohao Data has applied the energy storage+IDC operation mode in its Guangzhou No.2 Data Center. It is reported that Bohao Data has applied the energy storage system in Guangzhou No.2 Data Center. The energy storage system takes the lithium battery in electrochemistry as the main energy storage product, and is equipped with three sets of 250KW/1.72MWh electrochemical lithium energy storage systems with a total loading capacity of 5.16MWh. According to the set power target value, the energy storage system charges the battery during the low price period and discharges it during the peak price period. A single set of modular energy storage platform system is equipped with refrigeration system, dynamic environment monitoring system, video monitoring system, and fire protection system. The perfect energy storage function system makes it operate reliably and safely.
In this interview, Lv Xiaoyang said that with the continuous expansion of the difference between peak and valley electricity prices, and the future decline in the price of lithium iron phosphate batteries, energy storage will become the standard configuration of the data center.
Heroes think alike. Zhan Dongdong also believes that energy storage will become one of the important technology applications in the data center industry. He further said that the energy storage+IDC model needs intelligent solutions to achieve the "digital intelligence" transformation of the data center.
Hot word of the year - "counting from east to west"
Li Zhihong, vice president of Bohao Data: "In addition to meeting local needs, the Western Data Center is also guiding offline high computing businesses such as games, video rendering, development simulation or data storage businesses to the Western Data Center to reduce customer use costs."
If we want to select a word that will be the most popular in the data center industry in 2022, the author believes that it must be "counting from the east to the west". In February 2022, with the establishment of 8 nodes and 10 clusters, the project of "calculating data from the east to the west" will be officially launched. This national important strategic project, which is comparable to the "South to North Water Transfer", "West to East Power Transmission" and "West to East Gas Transmission", has had a significant impact on the entire IDC industry.
The construction of the "East Data and West Calculation" project solves the contradiction between the demand and cost of the existing data centers in the first tier cities. At present, the domestic data centers that have been operated are concentrated in the first tier cities, but the cost of land and energy consumption in the first tier cities is very high, which has formed a sharp opposition.
At the same time, the western region of China is sparsely populated, and has a variety of rich renewable energy sources, including wind and solar energy, providing a good development environment for the data center.
From a regional perspective, "counting from the east to the west" has eased the energy and resource constraints of first tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and has driven the economic development of second tier and third tier cities such as Zhongwei, Ulanqab, Chengdu, Chongqing, Gui'an, and even third tier and fourth tier cities in the western region, further balancing regional economy, and achieving the great goal of "common prosperity".
From the enterprise level, for enterprises that provide computing power, "East Data and West Computing" will accelerate the realization of cloud network collaboration and improve the quality of computing service; Reduce the cost of network, power and land; Planning and computing resources are more targeted to improve resource utilization.
For enterprises using computing power, it helps to enjoy more convenient and easy to use computing power services; Further reduce the cost of cloud usage and promote the process of enterprise digital transformation.
Li Zhihong, vice president of Bohao Data, said in an interview that due to factors such as economic activity, population density and network infrastructure, the development of data centers is mainly concentrated in eastern cities such as Beijing Rim, Yangtze River Delta and Dawan District. With the pressure of carbon emissions, eastern cities are increasingly strict in the assessment of energy consumption in the industry. Limited by the factors such as land resources and energy consumption indicators in eastern cities, data center enterprises are developing resources in the west. At the same time, due to the rich green power and cheap electricity prices in the west, the data center will have a greater advantage in OPEX in the west. "After the eight national hub nodes of the national integrated computing network planned by the country are connected through the corresponding backbone network, we believe that the customers of the data center will gradually consider the deployment in the west." Li Zhihong stressed.
According to Li Zhihong, Bohao Data has deployed new data centers in western China since 2022, taking local green power resources and PV available in the park as one of the factors. In addition to meeting local needs, the Western Data Center is also guiding offline businesses with high computing power, such as games, video rendering, development simulation or data storage, to the Western Data Center to reduce the use cost of customers.
Coincidentally, Zhan Dongdong also pointed out that under the guidance of the policy, more and more enterprises are considering the layout of data centers in the western region. "In the IDC industry, as a one-stop ICT service provider including IDC operation services, enterprise customers will actually begin to express their demand for data center resources in these (western) regions to us," said Zhan Dongdong.
It is easy to see from the overall trend of the data center industry in 2022 that although the "main battlefield" of IDC service providers is still concentrated in the first tier cities such as "Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen", under the guidance of policies, more and more data centers are emerging in the western region, which was originally a "digital desert". The layout of data centers in the western region has also become an important starting point for IDC service providers to improve their differentiated competitiveness.
Write at the end
The past 2022 is of great significance to the data center industry. The official launch of the "East Data and West Computing" project and the implementation of energy-saving review, carbon neutrality and other energy-saving and emission reduction measures have enabled the data center to enter a new era in terms of both industrial layout and technological evolution. The author believes that in 2023, under the guidance of policies such as "counting from the east to the west" and "carbon neutrality", new technologies such as new generation refrigeration technology, energy storage, modularization, distributed data centers, etc. will be more applied in data centers, and China's data center industry will welcome another technological innovation.
