The Value of Green Data Centers

Background Analysis

Data centers have become the cornerstone of enterprise business development worldwide, and many more enterprises will build data centers in the future. According to Gartner, there are more than three million data centers worldwide, and the global IDC market will increase from USD2 billion in 2010 to USD4.46 billion in 2015. Upgrades of traditional data centers and saturated business markets are contributing to a boom in the construction of large-scale cloud data centers in Europe and the US. Asia-Pacific is the world’s fastest growing market for data centers, especially Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia (which has the largest number of data centers in Asia-Pacific). In the near future, this region will likely become the world’s leading communications service center.

The IDC industry is developing rapidly in China and has great market potential. Over the past decade, the number of servers installed has increased 600%, and storage capacity has increased 6900%. The overall IDC market is expected to reach RMB180 billion (approximately USD29.7 billion) in 2015. Telecom, energy, finance, internet, and third-party IDC companies all have important roles in China’s IDC industry. In recent years, more and more industrial parks have opened in China to accommodate large data centers, most of which are located in developed cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. These cities have growing needs in terms of data-center backup, disaster recovery, and energy efficiency.

China’s traditional data centers are often unreasonably designed, costly, and environmentally unfriendly in terms of construction and usage. They are also often unreliable, unmanageable, and unscalable. One particular telecom operator in China has more than 300 star-rated IDC buildings. The data centers within these buildings handle more than 40,000 customers and 160,000 devices and consume a combined 1 billion KW of electricity each year. Declining telecommunication charges and rising electricity prices have eaten away this operator’s revenues.

The forward momentum of data centers and rapid increase in energy consumption are hot issues for industries and governments in China. Over the next few years, the focus will be on promoting and building next-generation green data centers and conserving energy within traditional data centers.

Next-Generation Data Centers: Development Trends

Market Size

A next-generation green data center will be a global cloud computing data center, a data-aggregation industrial park, or an international information hub. The scale of super data centers will be several hundred thousand square meters.

Functions and Services

Next-generation green data centers will be built according to IEEE802.3ba 40/100Gbit/s. With the development of cloud computing, next-generation green data centers will have integrated resources to deliver highly integrated, personalized services. Systems will be more flexible, intelligent, secure, and reliable.

Layout and Construction

Next-generation green data centers will gradually be developed in places with suitable climates; that is, in places with cold climates, abundant water, nearby power stations, and low-cost land. Facebook, Google, and Apple have built their new data centers in Oregon, North Carolina, Lulea and Sweden, all of which have cold climates. In 2010, HP established its first data center with a direct natural wind cooling in northeast Ireland. Glacier wind from the north Irish Sea is used to cool IT equipment and computer rooms.

Hosting data centers is part of China’s national strategic plan, and proposals have been made to build data centers in inland China, where the climate is favorable, there are adequate resources, and land is cheap and vast. Layouts for remote data transmission networks have also been proposed. These layouts save a lot of energy and space, protect the environment, and reduce costs.

Construction Mode

Next-generation green data centers will break through the limitations of traditional data centers. There will be cloud computing data centers, supercomputer centers, container data centers, modular data centers, warehouse data centers, and ship-based data centers.

Green and Energy Efficient

Energy efficiency and low carbon emissions will be a central theme of next-generation green data centers. Environmental friendliness will be an integral part of planning and design, material selection, construction and implementation, and OAM. Energy efficiency and emissions reduction will be achieved both technically and administratively. Efforts to make traditional data centers more energy efficient will be focused on communication rooms, data rooms, and base station rooms. Networks will be more quickly evolved, and energy-intensive equipment will be removed or reconstructed. Infrastructure reconstruction programs that save considerable energy will be implemented on a large scale. The growth of energy consumption will be controlled by management and technology innovation.

Operation, Maintenance and Management

The next-generation green data center will have high energy efficiency; it will be highly reliable and intelligent; it will have high density; it will be flexible; and it will be highly scalable. It will also have an active defense information security system. The next-generation green data center will also have a highly reliable power supply, energy-efficient cooling system, and intelligent, centralized management system. These will reduce carbon emissions over the life of the network and facilitate smooth expansion in the future.

Operating Environment

In 2008, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) released a white paper that the recommended room temperature of a data center should be between 18°C and 27°C, and the relative humidity should be 60%. ASHRAE members include AMD, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, and SGI. In practical applications of customers within China and from abroad, technical means have been successfully used to reduce the operating temperature of a data center.

High-Thermal-Density Data Centers

ASHRAE forecasts that the average power density of a single cabinet within a data center in China will be 3.7 KW in 2014. The average power density of a single cabinet within an overseas data center will be about 6.5 KW. In the future, much more attention will be given to cooling systems for high-thermal-density data centers. Intel uses vertical exhaust ducts (VEDs) for cabinets and ancillary cooling systems in its 30 high-thermal-density data centers. The average power density of a single Intel cabinet can reach 32 KW without the cabinet overheating. 

The Significance of Developing Next-Generation Green Data Centers

Promoting the construction of green data centers is of utmost importance. A green data center is an integral aspect of an enterprise’s social responsibility and helps an enterprise optimize OAM and reduce costs.