Under the Dome, the Green Environmental Road of ChinaCache Shouming

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."