The last night of February 2015 was
destined to belong to Chai Jing.
Chai Jing’s documentary of Under the Dome
has exploded the whole Chinese network, causing people to think what we can do
for the environment and ecology we are living in while making comments in Weibo
and WeChat. We, as the general public, can try our best to choose a green
transportation means such as bus, subway, and bicycle, choose high-quality oil
to reduce poisonous gas emission, have dust filtering devices equipped, file complaints
to the Environmental Protection Bureau for improvement in case of environmental
pollution.
For the data center industry of high
energy consumption, what can we do to protect our environment and ecology?
In recent years, data center construction has
shown a large-scale development trend, while the power consumption in a large
data center is quite striking. For example, for a data center with the construction
scale of 2,000 racks, based on the calculation of average power per rack of
3kW, the 2,000 racks will consume 6000-degree electricity, with yearly electricity
consumption of 52,560,000 kWh, in addition to other energy consumptions from air
conditioning, fresh air, electricity, and lighting in the data center. Huge
energy consumption has brought great pressure on the data center in terms of operating
cost and environmental protection. Therefore, data center construction is focusing
more and more to energy saving, with Green, Environmental Protection, Energy Saving,
and High Efficiency as the concept and direction for the construction of next
generation of data centers.
How to measure the energy consumption of
a data center?
PUE, short for Power Usage Effectiveness,
is the indicator for data center energy efficiency evaluation, and the ratio of
all the energy consumed in the data center and the energy consumed by IT loads.
PUE is a ratio, with 2 as its benchmark. The closer the ratio is towards 1, the
better energy efficiency level is. The PUE value has become internationally acknowledged
measurement index for data center power usage effectiveness. At present, the advanced
data center computer room PUE value in foreign countries is usually less than
2. According to MIIT statistics, at present, China's average data center PUE
value is between 2.2 and 3.0. While ChinaCache’s Shouming Cloud Data Center in
Shunyi Tianzhu Free Trade Zone is super large, with an area of 80,000 square
meters, containing about 7,500 racks, its PUE design value from 1.44 to 1.50,
with average PUE value of 1.46, fully in compliance with international leading Green
Data Center Energy Efficiency Standard.
The energy consumption in a typical data
center includes:
The first part is IT equipment, accounting
for about 50% of the total energy consumption of the data center, including
servers, storage equipment and network communication equipment, etc.;
The second part is air conditioning system,
accounting for about 37% of the total energy consumption of the data center,
with air conditioning cooling system accounting for about 25% of the total
power consumption, and air conditioning air supply and return system accounting
for about 12% of the total power consumption;
The third part is UPS power supply and
distribution system, covering about 10% of the total energy consumption of the
data center;
The last part is auxiliary lighting system.
The Green Data Center refers to maximum energy
efficiency and minimum environmental impact that IT, cooling, lighting and
electrical systems in the data center can achieve. The green concept is shown
in the overall planning and computer room air conditioning, UPS, servers and
other IT equipment, and management software application, with energy saving and
environmental protection, high reliability and availability, and rationality. Since
PUE = total data center equipment energy consumption/IT equipment energy
consumption, a lowered PUE value can be obtained by adopting energy-saving
measures to reduce equipment power consumption in the data center. Green and
energy saving concept has been deeply considered at the beginning of design and
construction of ChinaCache’s Shouming
Cloud Data
Center, and in strict
accordance with the national data center construction standards and regulations.
ChinaCache Shouming Cloud Data Center,
the domestic green data center model
For IT equipment energy consumption,
hardware vendors at present have been constantly improving chip manufacturing
technologies to reduce energy consumption. Therefore, under the condition of
same performance, ChinaCache Shouming center chooses the equipment with strong
heat dissipation capacity, small size, light weight, low noise and easy for
standard rack installation. With the maturation and launching of virtualized
cloud computing technologies, efficient power supplies, dynamic cooling, power intelligent
management and "dynamic sleeping" equipment can also help to improve the
data center’s IT utilization rate.
In terms of data center cooling, reasonable
air conditioning configuration and the selection can save energy consumption to
a certain level. For example, ChinaCache
Shouming Center
uses dual water-cooling system, through strict calculation to get optimum air
conditioning allocation, integrate natural cooling technology and magnetic suspension
centrifugal water-cooling system to greatly reduce the system’s energy
consumption, with reasonable design for air supply and return system. In
addition, independent temperature and humidity control system can reduce energy
consumption too.
By using high frequency energy-saving UPS
units, ChinaCache
Shouming Center
has improved power factors and efficiencies, thus providing high quality power
supply for the IT equipment. IGBT uncontrolled rectifier link is used for rectifier
part, improving AC current output waveform recovery rate, reducing total
harmonic distortion rate, significantly improving conversion efficiency and reducing
output loss, compared with ordinary equipment.
In the aspect of data center lighting, ChinaCache Shouming Center,
with adherence to the principle of green environmental protection, has reasonably
arranged lighting sources, chosen LED low-loss lighting tools and intelligent
control methods to reduce the energy consumption of lighting.
At present, there are some good data center
construction experiences in the world. Facebook's data center has achieved
solar power, to solve power supply in part, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions
from fossil fuel combustion. Apple's data center in North Carolina has been fully implementing
energy self-sufficiency with solar and biogas fuel power generation. The
foreign data center pioneers have begun to explore new types of energy supply, and
also become a reference for domestic data center construction.
Nowadays, with gradual transparency of
information, enhancement of environmental protection awareness, continuous
exploration of green energy-saving methods has become important for ChinaCache
Shouming data center construction. What we are doing here is for IT development
and ecological environment balance, for future’s sustainable development, and for
our every breath. We hope the environment we are looking forward to can be
realized by everyone’s small efforts.
"In spring, doors are open, with wind
blowing in and color everywhere. Sometimes, you run into a rain, or touch a fog.
You are tempted to have a deep breath. You can feel the taste of the rain, cold
and fresh."
