Text | Zhang Jingyi
Edit | Su Jianxun
On December 21, the 16th China IDC Industry Annual Ceremony "Data Center Carbon Neutrality Forum" was successfully held in Shenzhen. Liu Feng, general manager of Sino-Ocean Yuntai Data Technology Co., Ltd., was interviewed on the implementation of the "double carbon" policy. Liu Feng said, "The state has always paid great attention to the impact of climate change on society, actively promoted the work of carbon emission reduction, and formally put forward the strategic goal of carbon peaking by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060 in 2020; the 2021 government work report will list "solid carbon peaking and carbon neutrality work" as one of the key tasks; the "14th Five-Year Plan" put forward an action plan on the formulation of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality. The full implementation of the dual-carbon policy will surely promote the reshaping of the entire IDC industry pattern. ”
Liu Feng, General Manager of Sino-Ocean Data
Liu Feng mentioned: "Since 2020, the continuous tightening of energy evaluation indicators in various places has put forward higher requirements for the assessment of PUE indicators, and energy consumption indicators have become scarce resources. With the rapid growth of high-density computing demand in data centers and the implementation of "double carbon" policies, data centers are facing unprecedented energy consumption and heat dissipation challenges. Coupled with the implementation of domestic power curtailment measures, the overall operation of IDC has been seriously affected, and the development of liquid cooling technology has gradually become the focus of data centers.
According to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the cloud computing and big data research institute predicts that by 2025, the proportion of liquid-cooled data centers replacing traditional data centers is expected to reach 25%. In 2025, the market size of China's liquid-cooled data centers will exceed 120 billion yuan, and there is still great room for growth in the liquid-cooled market.
Liquid cooling technology As a new technology, users need to accept a certain amount of time, and there are still concerns about the safety, reliability, or maintenance of liquid cooling. Under the traction of the "double carbon" goal, the industry pays more and more attention to liquid cooling, and more people realize that liquid cooling technology is the inevitable direction of refrigeration. Liu Feng believes that "when the industry develops to a certain extent and the customer acceptance is improved, liquid cooling must be a priority choice." ”
Liu Feng mentioned: "Liquid cooling technology is facing difficulties, first of all, the economy of data center projects, liquid cooling technology is difficult to promote at a high cost. Secondly, liquid cooling technology is still in the experimental stage, and there are many problems in operation. With the help of the double carbon policy, the investment in research and development of liquid cooling technology has gradually increased, the maturity of technology has been continuously improved, and the cost of technology can be controlled within a reasonable range, and liquid cooling technology can get out of the economic and technical dilemma. ”
Liu Feng believes that the promotion of liquid cooling technology needs to be broken in two directions: First, the customer side, using liquid cooling technology, needs to change the design of traditional servers and the way of server operation and maintenance. Secondly, the industrial chain of liquid cooling technology needs to be improved, and the application of liquid cooling technology in data centers is still in the experimental stage, and the operation and management experience is insufficient. With the decline in costs and the maturity of technology, the entire liquid cooling industry will develop rapidly. ”
Liu Feng believes that the use of liquid cooling technology, although the cost is relatively high, but under the traction of the "double carbon" goal, the application of liquid cooling technology will become an inevitable trend. Ocean Data in the operation and management, pay special attention to reducing the data center PUE and energy optimization, in the cold storage peaking technology, Ocean Data a data center of the cold storage tank capacity configuration is the general data center cold storage conventional design of 6 times as much, which is mainly in the night trough period cold storage, in the daytime peak hour cooling, so that continuous refrigeration has greater redundancy, greatly reducing the cost of operation and maintenance; in the past to reduce the PUE process, the end of the air conditioning is easy to be ignored by data center manufacturers. Ocean Data has continuously tried to achieve optimized energy saving of terminal air conditioners. The data shows that the end air conditioning power consumption in the entire data center power consumption accounted for a relatively high proportion, ocean data to double point control to replace the single point control, air supply control water valve, return air control fan, so that the air conditioning side of the energy consumption significantly reduced by about 40%, PUE factor can be reduced by 0.037 to 0.04. This is a very rare result for the energy optimization of mature computer rooms.
From focusing on first-tier cities to expanding to the central and western regions with rich resource reserves, Sino-Ocean Data has completed the layout of several core regions in the country, with 13 data centers in 11 cities, more than 20,000 cabinets in operation, and 100,000 cabinet reserve resources. In addition, Sino-Ocean Data is also actively expanding the scale of data centers through investment methods, enriching the national layout, and providing customers with more choices.
National layout of ocean data
As a platform company focusing on the data center industry under Sino-Ocean Capital, Sino-Ocean Data will rely on the "capital + industrial platform" model to accelerate the construction of a future-oriented data center infrastructure network through the three-wheel drive of "breakthrough leadership on the asset side, vigorous strengthening of the sales end, and iterative upgrading of the operation end". Relying on the background of shareholders, Sino-Ocean Data has obvious advantages in financing, investment and expansion, operational capabilities, as well as the ability to obtain customers in government, enterprises and financial industries, and gradually builds core competitiveness.
The following is the interview transcript of Liu Feng, general manager of Sino-Ocean Yuntai Data Technology Co., Ltd., and 36Kr Media, which was released after collation.
Media: Since the 922 policy was implemented for more than a year, what is the overall feeling?
Liu Feng: The most direct feeling of policy implementation is the tightening of the evaluation indicators. In the past, the energy evaluation indicators of first-tier cities were tightened, and now all cities are tightening. Sino-Ocean Data has great advantages, the data center project can be evaluated index reserves are more sufficient, in operation and under construction of data centers, have a complete can be evaluated, which in the industry is a very high order of magnitude. In 2021, many data centers have been affected by the power curtailment measures in South China, and data center manufacturers are also very concerned about the compliance operation of the evaluation indicators. Data centers in Guangzhou that do not have the index will be listed on the watch list, and customers will be forced to move away from these data centers. The "double carbon" policy has a very large impact on the industry and will promote the reshaping of the entire industry pattern.
The financial calculation of the data center project and the financial calculation of the customer, the electricity price are a very sensitive factor. In the past, electricity prices were stable and declining, and the electricity limit in 2021 led to upward fluctuations in electricity prices, which had a great impact on the operation of the entire data center.
From the perspective of data center construction and operation, more attention will be paid to the rational use of energy, especially in terms of reducing PUE, data centers will optimize energy and reduce PUE as the basic requirements of refined operation management. PUE affects the profits of enterprises, which is the performance of the core competitiveness of enterprises, and will eventually affect the survival of enterprises. Therefore, the "double carbon" policy has great pressure on the industrial structure and technological innovation.
Media: In the process of carbon reduction, how to better serve enterprises on the one hand, and help enterprises to do a good job in carbon reduction operations on the other hand? What are the suggestions and ideas from the data center?
Liu Feng: Data centers are an energy-intensive industry, and we attach great importance to achieving carbon reduction goals. From the perspective of data center operation, the main power consumption is IT equipment and power equipment. Therefore, in the optimization of the operational efficiency of the data center, it is mainly focused on the energy consumption control and management of the refrigeration system, mainly including two aspects.
The first is the application of liquid cooling systems, although ocean data does not currently use liquid cooling technology, but we believe that liquid cooling technology is a particularly important technical direction to reduce energy consumption in the future. At present, Ali and Baidu have been carrying out relevant experiments on liquid cooling technology, and we believe that liquid cooling technology is the most effective way to reduce PUE. We closely track the evolution of liquid cooling technology, and when the cost is reduced to a reasonable level, liquid cooling technology will be more widely used in data centers.
Secondly, in terms of carbon reduction, for large industrial parks, data centers that have the conditions to use clean energy photovoltaic power generation, we try to use clean energy. Although the power generation of photovoltaic systems is a small part of the power consumption of data centers, it is also a way to reduce carbon emissions.
Media: What are the biggest problems you have when it comes to building efficient and low-carbon data center infrastructure? And how to solve these problems?
Liu Feng: The biggest problem is actually the synergy of the entire industrial chain. From the perspective of data center construction and operation, it is very desirable to promote liquid cooling technology, but the promotion of liquid cooling technology will encounter two problems.
The first is the customer side, where customers have to accept liquid cooling technology and changes to the traditional server design and server operation and maintenance methods. Secondly, the liquid cooling technology industry chain still needs to be improved. The application of liquid cooling technology has higher and stricter requirements for the IT equipment of the data center, which will bring a reconstruction to the entire industrial chain of the server and even the data center, which also reflects the trend of multi-professional integration in the data center industry, which will be a huge challenge for the entire industry.
We will gradually promote liquid cooling technology in some qualified data centers, starting at the module level and adopting liquid cooling technology for some modules. Sino-Ocean Data's newly built data center is also constantly exploring, looking for some customers who are willing to use liquid cooling technology, and trying to use liquid cooling to do refrigeration.
Media: What do green data centers need to meet? Are there any good operational solutions or practices that you can introduce to us?
Liu Feng: First of all, the green data center must be legal and compliant, and the data center that is illegal, non-compliant and does not have the evaluation index will not be declared. Second, the green data center operation PUE remains at a low level and must be below 1.4. Moreover, customer usage, customer usage is a very important green indicator of the data center.
In addition, in terms of construction, photovoltaic and building integration technology is adopted, and green environmental protection materials are used. In terms of data center operation, the accumulation and improvement of O&M experience will be an important direction to reduce PUE green data center. In the operation management, Sino-Ocean Data pays special attention to reducing data center PUE and energy optimization. In terms of cold storage and peak shaving technology, the capacity configuration of the cold storage tank in a data center of Sino-Ocean Data Beijing is more than 6 times that of the conventional design of general data center cold storage, which mainly stores cold during the night trough period and releases the cold during the daytime peak period, which makes the continuous refrigeration have greater redundancy and greatly reduces the operation and maintenance costs.
In the past process of reducing PUE, end air conditioning is a link that is easily ignored by data center manufacturers. Ocean Data has continuously tried to achieve optimized energy saving of terminal air conditioners. The data shows that the end air conditioning power consumption in the entire data center power consumption accounted for a relatively high proportion, ocean data to double point control to replace the single point control, air supply control water valve, return air control fan, so that the air conditioning side of the energy consumption significantly reduced by about 40%, PUE factor can be reduced by 0.037 to 0.04. This is a very rare result for the energy optimization of mature computer rooms.
Liquid cooling technology is the development trend of refrigeration in the data center industry, with the maturity of technology and the decline in cost, the performance safety of liquid cooling technology, supporting facilities, personnel supervision, refrigeration technology and other improvement of the whole industry chain, and will become the main way of refrigeration in the data center industry.