Data Center Construction: Prevention of foam resource priority

With the "Twelve-Five" plan to promote the integration of information and industrialization, accelerate the economic and social information in all areas of the principle of clear, data center as an industry information carrier, its importance is constantly highlighted.

In order to meet the requirement of increasing the level of social informatization, we should promote the reasonable layout and healthy development of data center, especially large data center. Recently, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Guidance on the construction of Data Center" (hereinafter referred to as "guidance"). Market demand-oriented, resource and environment priority, and regional co-ordination are the guiding ideas for promoting the construction and layout of data center.

Data center construction to prevent bubbles

In the background of cloud computing and large data wave sweeping the world, the data center market is returning to the fast growth channel after experiencing financial crisis. Data show that 2011, China's data center services market size reached 158.75 billion yuan, an increase of 18.6%, is expected to 2015, the scale will reach 303.11 billion yuan, the annual composite growth rate of 17.8%.

Huge market cakes have led to massive construction of data centers around the world. Many local government data center construction began to "build", even slightly "backward" local government, its cloud computing data center Construction plan also put on the agenda. Currently, there are more than 640,000 data centers in China. When another round of data center construction boom in the nationwide rise, industry experts warned that data center construction has been a bubble trend.

Expert analysis, on the one hand, because of technology, capital and talent and other reasons, many small and medium-sized data center technology structure behind, low resources deployment capacity, management and development is not coordinated, the average utilization of resources is only 20% to 30%, the prevalence of energy efficiency is poor, low level, repeat construction and other phenomena. Data center upgrade is difficult to keep up with the pace of technological progress because of its complicated technology, high cost, difficult operation and rapid change of users ' demands.

On the other hand, many regions do not have enough power and cooling capacity to meet the needs of a new generation of high-density servers and storage devices, and the capacity growth of traditional data centers is severely constrained by space, expansion and development.

It is understood that at present, a data center on the scale of three years of electricity consumption, approximately equal to the cost of construction of the data center. The speed at which data centers are built may not be nearly as fast as data volumes and storage requirements. The rapid development and upgrading of storage technology, but also the various units it talent resources stretched, unable to deal with.

Experts said that compared with developed countries, China's data center development level is quite backward, and China's rapid development of information technology is extremely disproportionate, the traditional data center road is unsustainable, the data center must take the industrialization development path. This is also the guidance of the requirements of data center construction adhere to the market demand-oriented principles of the meaning of the problem.

Strategic layout should embody the priority principle of resource and environment

With the surge in demand from business and data centralized management, the continuous change of business model and the rapid expansion of business intension, as well as the demand of data backup generated by increasing information security and business continuity requirements, make traditional data center face serious challenge in scale, energy consumption, efficiency, resource integration and information security. Many local government and enterprise data centers have encountered expansion and development problems, but also have a strong desire to build large-scale data centers.

But experts say as our data center construction speed has been far beyond the actual demand, especially some local governments "rush" into the cloud computing data center in the tide, some places even completely divorced from the actual situation, such as local economic development and industrial development needs, in fact, do not need a huge data center to meet, The construction of data centers will drag down local economic growth.

Moreover, experts believe that the spatial layout of the data center is unreasonable, the east, the middle and the West have not yet formed a complementary industrial pattern. At present, China's data center room is mainly distributed in Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Guangdong and other regions. Experts say the huge demand for energy and cooling in high-capacity storage makes the regional layout of the data center an important issue. But in the data Center regional layout, our country and abroad have the huge difference.

It is understood that Google and Microsoft and other solar power as the first choice for energy supply, in order to reduce air-conditioning demand, the Arctic Circle to build data center room. However, the data centers in China are mainly concentrated in the coastal areas, high energy consumption, heat-causing is the data center is facing two major problems. The rising energy costs have also exacerbated the coastal power supply tensions. As a result, experts suggest that large data center layouts should focus on the north.

The directive opinion also requests, the new very large data center and large data center, must consider the climate environment, the energy supply and so on key factors. We encourage large data centers and large data centers, especially those with low real-time requirements such as disaster preparedness, to prioritize in the cold, energy-rich areas.