Recently, the National Development and Reform Commission and other departments recently jointly issued a document agreeing to start the construction of national computing power hub nodes in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, yangtze river delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu and Ningxia, and planning 10 national data center clusters. At this point, the national integrated big data center system has completed the overall layout design, and the "East Number West Calculation" project has been officially launched. How will "Counting East and Counting West" open a new chapter in the computing power network? The communication world focuses on this topic, invites industry experts to express their views, and we look at the "East Counting West" together.
At present, the industry's interpretation of the "East Number West Calculation" policy, many of which are from the perspective of green and low carbon, believe that after the data center lifts the restriction of high energy consumption through geographical migration, it will inevitably usher in the rapid development of the entire industry, and whether it is telecom operators, or server-related manufacturers and Internet manufacturers, who are deeply involved in it, will be favored by the policy and pull a wave of performance. The author does not oppose such a view, but I also want to remind the industry that in the upcoming good situation, it is still necessary to be vigilant against risks, practice internal skills, and improve capabilities. The specific analysis is as follows.
The boom in the data center industry is not just about volume
Figure 1 and Figure 2 are from the "2021 China Data Center Market Report" released at the "2021 Data Center Standard Summit". As can be seen from Figure 1, in fact, since 2020, the number of cabinets in mainland data centers has begun to grow significantly; but from Figure 2, the average cabinet listing rate of data centers in the country is only 50.1%, the northeast, northwest, southwest and central China are all about 40%, and the high areas are mainly North China, East China and South China (that is, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area), and the shelf rate is only less than 70%.
Figure 1 The annual total number of data center cabinets in the country
Figure 2 Average cabinet shelf availability rate of data centers in various regions of the country
These data imply a more serious problem, that is, in the central and western regions, data center cabinets are relatively surplus, with the implementation of the national "East Number West Calculation" project, the regional computing power in the Central and Western Regions will be rapidly improved, so will there be a further decline in the shelf rate of data centers? If such problems arise, how will the return on investment in the data center be realized, and is this really beneficial for the industry as a whole?
Of course, the trend of the development of the mainland digital economy will not stop, and the state will further guide the existing computing demand to migrate to the central and western regions, and the demand for data center infrastructure in the western region will still be greatly improved, and there will be no phenomenon of "a large number of construction and a lot of idleness". However, specific to each region and each operating unit, the situation may be quite different. Among them, what can play a decisive role is the basic logic and key winning elements of data center operation, that is, the degree to which the data center meets customer needs.
For customers, the main factors in choosing which or which data center providers, in addition to the core element of price, include several aspects such as geographical location, network connectivity, reliability, security and scalability. The following is only to describe the network connection, which is what telecom operators are good at.
According to the guiding opinions of the "Implementation Plan for the National Integrated Big Data Center Collaborative Innovation System Computing Power Hub" in May 2021, the end-to-end one-way network latency of the data center is within 20 milliseconds in principle, and the latency is within 10 milliseconds in principle for real-time business requirements such as the Internet of Vehicles, networked drones, smart power, smart factories, and intelligent security. It is known that the speed of light is 300,000 kilometers per second, the distance from Shanghai to Chengdu is about 2,000 kilometers, and the transmission of light takes 6.7 milliseconds, but the network transmission involves many links, and the time required is definitely greater than 6.7 milliseconds, which means that the real-time service requirements of the east are placed in the west, which is unrealistic only from the perspective of network latency.
Because of this, in view of the "East Counting West Calculation" project, the state has also clarified the different computing power needs of the eight major hubs, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing Region, Yangtze River Delta Region, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region are mainly responsible for data processing with low latency requirements; Guizhou, Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Ningxia 4 western nodes will be responsible for undertaking nationwide background processing, offline analysis, storage and backup and other non-real-time computing power requirements. This is a good specification and guidance for the development of data centers, but it may face many challenges in the implementation process, the most direct of which is the separation and coordinated development of east and west nodes. The western node may not be willing to only undertake the demand for low latency computing power, and realize the computing power service with comparable latency through a large amount of investment such as backbone network upgrades, or provide higher cost-effective computing power services, and participate more in market competition and customer snatching. Of course, healthy competition is good, but if the east and west grabs more fiercely, it may affect the profitability of the industry's data centers and ultimately restrict the healthy development of the data center industry.
Because of this, for the "east number west calculation", the industry can not simply think of it as the physical migration of the eastern data center demand to the west, but the western data center on the basis of differentiated positioning with the eastern data center, to achieve benign coordinated development: the eastern data center still has to develop, but more is on the basis of structural optimization, the west is to accelerate the development on the basis of the unreasonable structural migration in the east. The development of the western region can be accelerated, but the key is to look at the speed of migration of this demand, if the simple pursuit of quantitative development, may lead to a further excess of western production capacity, which the government and enterprises are not willing to see.
Operators need to accelerate the pace of transformation
The key to the vigorous development of the data center industry lies in the transformation of operators from data infrastructure providers to core enablers of digital transformation.
As mentioned above, "East counting and west counting" will inevitably bring about the rapid development of data centers, but if the data center industry wants to seize this opportunity, one is to rely on construction; the other is to standardize operations, including regional coordination, industry collaboration, etc., to achieve the orderly construction and orderly operation of the entire data center industry, and avoid the emergence of disorderly price wars, digging walls and feet.
Similar to operators being "piped" in basic business, in the data center industry, there are similar problems, operators take on more of the role of infrastructure, providing customers with racks and power, customers "run" on what applications, basically do not participate. As operators gradually shift to integrated information service providers, they have been exploring ways to provide more value-added services for data centers, including security protection, load balancing, etc., but the current transformation has not been significant enough.
Under the general trend of "counting the east and counting the west", telecom operators will inevitably assume the important role of infrastructure builders. In this major historical opportunity, can telecom operators do more? The answer is yes, but the first step is to shift from a data infrastructure provider to a core enabler of digital transformation.
In 2020, the scale of China's digital economy reached 39.2 trillion yuan, accounting for 38.6% of GDP, and the digital economy has two major bases: one is the data center, and the other is the network. It can be said that the "storage + network" of telecom operators has played a great external effect, although it accounts for a very low proportion in the digital economy, but it is absolutely indispensable. However, operators can not only look at external effects, will they continue to grow bigger and stronger in this field?
The author believes that "East counting and west counting" is not only "moving the customer's server from the east to the west", the future customer's storage resource distribution will be more decentralized, real-time business is dominated by the eastern data center, and non-real-time business is mainly in the western data center, which means that customers may need to spend a lot of energy to carry out resource scheduling and collaborative services. From this point of view, this will be a big opportunity for telecom operators. Under the background of telecom operators proposing the "cloud to digital transfer" strategy, through deep participation in the customer's digital resource scheduling and collaborative optimization project, telecom operators can more deeply understand the customer traffic law, insight into customer traffic trends, provide customers with storage and network matching optimization suggestions consulting services, and provide customers with data center services from storage-based to providing solutions. Of course, this transformation process is very difficult, and it will not be completed only by the telecom operators themselves, but also need to innovate in collaboration with the corresponding industrial partners. This transformation is necessary and very worthwhile, "east and west" and "double gigabit" (5G + gigabit network) is not the ultimate goal, but it can be said that it is the most core strategy during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period and even longer. It is hoped that telecom operators can seize the opportunity, seriously position, not only see the dividends of computer room construction brought by "east numbers and west counting", but also deeply understand this policy from a higher level, truly seize the opportunity during the opportunity period of digital transformation in the mainland, and be the "core enabler of digital transformation".
End
Author: Research Institute of China Telecom Co., Ltd
Xu Liang, Li Yang, Huang Xinqian
Editor-in-Charge/Layout: Fan Fan
Review: Shen Qing
Producer: Liu Qicheng
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