What do you know about the container data center?

What do you know about the container data center?

According to a recent report of the 2014 container Data Center released by IHS, Huawei's container data center won the world's first shipment title. According to IHS's prediction, the container data center will continue to grow at an average rate of 16.2% in the next five years. So the question is, what advantages does the container data center grow so quickly? How far can the container data center go?

 

According to the 2014 container Data Center report released by IHS, Huawei ranked first in shipments in the world.

1. Background of container data center

The development of big data significantly increases the requirements for data center construction speed. The traditional data center construction mode covers early consulting planning and design, investment expense application approval, high-level design, and project bidding, the construction of civil engineering, water and electricity engineering to data center is complex, and the project construction cycle is long, which cannot meet the needs of business development. In this context, how to quickly, efficiently, and easily design, deploy, and manage data centers has become an extremely important issue. The modular products of the container data center include the Integrated box, the IT box (Equipment Box), and the Support Box (also called the auxiliary box). The integrated box is the ultimate embodiment of the modular data center. The container data center transfers the design and most of the construction of the data center to the factory for pre-customization, and builds the data center in the form of building blocks at the site to achieve rapid deployment and greatly improve the efficiency of the data center.

2. Unique Advantages of container data centers

1) rapid field deployment

As we all know, in the initial construction of traditional data centers, the focus and focus will certainly be on the infrastructure construction and civil engineering of the data centers. That is to say, we have to build the house first if we want to catch the cold, however, due to the increasing and changing user requirements, some immeasurable changes may occur during the construction of the data center, which severely compromises the construction of the data center.

However, the construction of the container data center is based on different modules, and the modules appear in the form of standard containers. The specific changes in the construction of the data center can basically be deployed in the factory, the building site only needs to provide standard interfaces for water, electricity, and networks required by each module. The building structure is a standard factory, and the construction of the building and data center module can be synchronized. This method can greatly save the construction time of the data center and flexibly meet the requirements for data center changes. Compared with the traditional construction mode, it takes only one week for the container data center to complete deployment and installation, which can meet the requirements of fast business launch and agile response.

Typical Cases in the industry include McKinsey University in Brazil. Huawei provides flexible deployment and fast delivery of container data center solutions, and completes the construction and deployment of data centers within four months, the PUE value reaches 1.55, reducing energy consumption. The entire plan saved McKinsey University an initial investment of 40%. It will take the next five years as an investment cycle, saving millions of dollars in O & M costs. This solution eliminates the need to build additional houses at McKinsey University and meets the needs of university education informatization data computing without breaking the overall structure of the building.

2) flexible and variable modules, resizing required

Compared with traditional data centers, the use of container data centers has become a highlight in scalability. The Data Center Administrator only needs to place the corresponding number of containers according to different user needs, connect the mains to the carrier network to expand the network.

The Network Communication Between modular devices can be flexibly expanded to meet business needs for rapid deployment. The 2N + 1 UPS power supply and distribution system and the design mode of N + 1 cooling system are adopted, it can also ensure the high reliability of the system. Modular construction mode, power distribution, refrigeration and other infrastructure fully adopt modular technology, relying on flexible planning of business needs, to facilitate flexible expansion when business development needs. The intelligent management system monitors and manages power, environment, security, and other systems in a centralized manner in real time. It adopts a flexible physical architecture and modular design ideas, it can manage the infrastructure of a single data center and centrally manage the infrastructure of data centers in multiple regions.

3. Problems faced by container data centers

1) Environmental Adaptability

For some special application scenarios, such as oil and gas exploration, Marine Scientific Examination, military, and disaster-stricken areas, the application environment of data centers is extremely harsh. To ensure that the container data center can adapt to the harsh environment in the field, container data centers not only require frequent movement and rapid deployment, but also put forward higher requirements in Environmental Adaptability such as earthquake resistance, shock absorption, and corrosion resistance. Currently, mainstream manufacturers are represented by China. In terms of earthquake resistance of containers, they have carried out in-depth research and implementation of the perfect combination of component-level and box-level earthquake resistance, the container data center can meet the seismic performance requirements of etsi en 300 019-2-4 outdoor standards (equivalent to the magnitude of magnitude 9 or higher), thus greatly expanding the field application scope of the container data center.

2) convenient maintenance

The limited space of the container data center poses a challenge to the maintenance personnel, and the small maintenance space makes the maintenance inconvenient. At present, some mainstream manufacturers are trying to make breakthroughs. For example, Huawei, the world's No. 1 manufacturer in shipments in 2014, adopts the patented technology warehouse separation layout to achieve 36 inch pre-maintenance space and 24 inch post-maintenance space, both the front and back maintenance are in the box, effectively solving the severe injury caused by container maintenance. At the same time, IBM, Huawei, HP and other manufacturers have created "business-oriented" end-to-end data center professional services from a macro perspective, from data center infrastructure (Layer1) to IT infrastructure (Layer2), as well as application layer (Layer3) and business layer (Layer4), you can provide one-stop professional services.

4. Conclusion

These characteristics of the container data center allow enterprises to expand their data center capacity within a short period of time. They can also be used as separate modules, establish independent disaster recovery sites outside the data centers of business owners, or conduct outdoor operations for military projects, oil and gas companies, and large-scale activities, it is the best solution for fast and flexible enterprise data centers. Container data centers are deployed in the field, especially in scenarios with requirements for the construction period. The advantages of traditional container data centers are incomparable. In the future trend of data centers, container data centers will be widely used with a deeper understanding of container data centers, and become an indispensable data center construction mode in some scenarios.