Visit Active Power: Modular data centers are inevitable

There is a view that http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13422.html "> Cloud computing technology will again trigger the industrial revolution, and become a measure of national comprehensive strength of the important indicators." According to relevant data statistics, China now has 19 local government-led large-scale data center pilot is gradually established to seize the commanding heights of the market. Because of the scale effect, energy consumption, management, maintenance and other problems will be infinitely magnified, then the future of the data center in what direction, what are the requirements? To this end, the reporter interviewed Activepower (Aikovo) Company's global vice President Martin (Martin).

Mr. Martin, Global vice president of ▲activepower Corporation

Mr Martin believes that while the Chinese market is not perfect compared to the European and American markets, its intrinsic potential is far more than that in Europe and the US. And this is not just a prediction, but an objective reality. The Chinese market, for example, can be seen from Apple's sales of Apple handsets and tablets in the Chinese market, and the previous Nokia handset business has been able to become a global hegemon. So from these perspectives, in the future, China's cloud computing market will be far more than Europe and the United States.

Scale efficiency forces data centers to focus on energy-saving details

According to the data collected from media reports, there are now 19 regions in the Chinese market that have been led by the government to establish cloud pilots. Because of the scale effect, large data centers are bound to consume very large quantities of energy, and green technology will become the new darling of the data center. According to Mr. Martin, the traditional view is that the key to reducing data center Pue value is to reduce the energy consumption and heat dissipation of the server. In large data centers, the reduction of Pue value is not only from these two aspects, energy-related savings are very easy to trigger the scale effect.

At the same time, Mr. Martin explained to us several findings of the Activepower company in the construction of the data center. According to data from Mr. Martin, other energy consumption in the entire data center, in addition to the energy generated by the normal operation of IT equipment, is mainly focused on heat dissipation and distribution. For example, take Pue value, if a data center Pue value is 1.2, then this one of the "1" is the normal operation of IT equipment energy consumption, "0.2" is the heat dissipation and power consumption. In this "0.2", two-thirds of the energy consumption is heat dissipation energy, and the other one-third is power distribution energy consumption. In the large data centers of thousands of servers, these power consumption is not to be underestimated.

Mr. Martin said that chemical ups first converts electrical energy into chemical energy, and then converts chemical energy into electricity when it encounters a power outage. Two conversion can waste energy, and chemical ups to prolong life, the need for regular discharge, to add trouble to management. The flywheel energy storage device developed by the chemical Ups,activepower Company can completely avoid these troubles. In the power supply, the 600-pound flywheel in the vacuum state at 7700 rpm at the speed of continuous rotation, a certain mains fault, due to inertia, the flywheel will continue to rotate, the kinetic energy into electricity.

According to the data provided by Mr. Martin, flywheel storage can reduce energy loss by 75% compared with traditional chemical ups, and in the interactive design power supply, flywheel energy storage efficiency can reach 98%, and traditional chemical storage energy can only reach 92%. And, its failure rate is much lower, the service life of up to 20 years, the raw material poisonous harmful chemicals, 100% recyclable.

Modular Datacenter is a future trend

Mr. Martin believes that once the size of the data center is large and large-scale, there will be a hardware malfunction almost every day, and the modularity of data centers is inevitable in order to facilitate operation and maintenance. The concept of modularity has actually been put forward and is now gradually being developed in the data center.

For example, we are familiar with the storage system, in order to ensure uninterrupted business, the general high-end storage systems are modular design, and support hot-swappable. In addition to being able to expand the capacity on demand, the biggest advantage is that it is easy to repair, a hardware failure, in the case of redundancy, the failure of the hardware directly out, and then replaced by the system to support new hardware. The technology has grown so well in the storage industry that many low-end storage products are now popular.

Simplifying Data center management is a big factor in reducing enterprise operating costs, such as Facebook's data center in Oregon State, which houses tens of thousands of servers, but only 55 executives in charge of operations. And, with the launch of the container Data center by Microsoft, HP, IBM and Dell, the modular design concept will expand its scope of application.

In fact, there is a view that users tend to focus on the effects of the solution rather than the underlying technology. Nearly all of the IT solution vendors in the industry are now offering a holistic solution, such as Dell's Vstart, to provide users with a total solution of 50, 100, or 200 virtual machines, including hardware, virtualization software, consolidation management tools, installation and deployment services, and more. Again, such as Microsoft, HP provided by the container data center, inside the server, storage, network, power supply, heat dissipation, directly towed back, power can be used, the requirements of the environment greatly reduced.

As with other consumer-grade products, Mr Martin argues, data centers are bound to evolve into a pipeline of repeatability, predictability and sustainability. The advantage is not only can learn from good experience, reduce the difficulty of deployment, and can significantly reduce the late operation, management, maintenance difficulties. At present, Activepower Company's strategic partners include Microsoft, IBM, HP, Sun and other internationally renowned companies, these companies to launch a container data center is likely to adopt the Activepower company's flywheel energy storage device.

And, according to Mr. Martin, although Activepower Company entered China later, it has provided services to many companies such as the National Grid, Shanghai Electric Power, Jiangsu electric Power and Huawei. Activepower Company's growth rate in the Chinese market has reached 300% this year, and for next year's sales forecasts, Martin said, will increase by 200% on this basis, the Chinese market will become Activepower Company's main interest growth point.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)