This year, the global pandemic has brought great changes to people's production and life. On the one hand, cloud living has gradually integrated into people's life, and cloud exhibitions, cloud office and cloud games are booming; on the other hand, the demand for digital transformation of enterprises is urgent. Enabling new economic development momentum and creating new competitive advantages through emerging digital technologies has become a broad consensus of the international community. We are now moving from traditional economy to digital economy.

However, the old saying often says to do things "down-to-earth". Of course, cloud living is not a "rootless tree”, in which the"root" is the big data center that has been rising in recent years. On March 4th this year, the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee has held a meeting, clearly stating that "accelerating the construction of new types of infrastructure such as 5G networks and IDCs" is to lay a good foundation for cloud living.

Story behind IDC

With the fast track of digital transformation and intelligent transformation upgrading of Chinese enterprises, the IDC industry has developed rapidly. From 2018 to 2019, the growth rate reached about 30% respectively. China's IDC industry circle predicts that the IDC market will continue to maintain a growth rate of about 30% in the next three years, and the market scale is expected to reach 348.19 billion yuan in 2022. With the transformation of China's economic momentum, new technology industries such as the Internet economy, 5G, artificial intelligence, and industrial Internet, as well as the digital economy are poised for development, and there is huge room for the development of IDCs.

However, as for IDC, we often only see the role it can play after its completion, but often ignore the construction process of IDC itself, which is actually the process of "building the foundation" for new infrastructure. Hotwon was keenly aware of this future opportunity, and hired Mr. Zhang Daguang, an expert with rich experience in big data center design and construction, as the chief engineer of Hotwon design institute.

Mr. Zhang Daguang, chief engineer of Hotwon design institute

Mr. Zhang Daguang has worked in corporations such as China Hewlett-Packard Co., Ltd. and China Electronics Engineering Design Institute successively, and has nearly 20 years' experience in IDC industry consulting, design, implementation and verification. He has presided over and participated in the construction of many well-known IDC projects, among which the famous Baidu Cloud Computing (Yangquan) Center was presided over by him as the chief designer, and he told the reporters the story behind the IDC construction.

Soul of IDC construction - Design

In Zhang Daguang's view, design is the soul of IDC construction. “No matter what kind of IDCs they are, high reliability, easy operation and maintenance, flexible expansion, reduction of construction and operation and maintenance costs are the common requirements for most of them, so these requirements should be taken into account from the beginning of IDC design and construction. Without good design, the requirements for IDCs can't be discussed at all.”

Zhang Daguang said: “The planning and design, construction and operation and maintenance of a IDC are linked together as a whole.” In the construction process of the data center, the first part is civil construction and electromechanical construction. The data center is a building first. Masonry and cement are the basic materials that make up IDC. Although it sounds insignificant and seems to be no different from building a house, it is the basic carrier of IDC and plays a decisive role in the overall reliability of IDC.

Zhang Daguang made an example: "When we ordinary people buy a house, everyone goes in to see how the decoration is, but whether the basic elements such as the building structure and water and electricity of the house are arranged reasonably is what greatly will truly affect your living comfort."

With the rapid development of big data, cloud computing and other fields in China, the construction of IDC has been surging in recent years, and even surpassed some internationally renowned manufacturers in construction experience. Based on rich construction experience, there are some similarities in the design of domestic big data centers. Zhang Daguang believes that at present, the design and construction of big data centers in China has reached the stage where details determine success or failure.

"The reliability of IDC is suitable for Cannikin Law. We may do similar things in the general direction, but some deficiencies in details may lead to a significant reduction in the overall reliability of IDC. Therefore, at this stage, we should pay more attention to the details of the design of IDC." Said Zhang Daguang to reporters.

Building a green IDC

Since the birth of the data center, it has been accompanied by the problem of high energy consumption. According to the public network data, there are about 430,000 IDCs in China. The power consumption of China's IDCs has increased by more than 12% for eight consecutive years, and the total power consumption is expected to reach 296.2 billion kW in 2020. With the rapid development of information construction, IDC is becoming a new energy consumer.

Therefore, promoting the construction of green IDCs has become the global common development direction. Recently, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, National Development and Reform Commission, Ministry of Commerce, National Government Offices Administration, China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, National Energy Administration and other six departments issued the Notice on Organizing the Recommendation of National Green IDC (2020), advocating speeding up the construction of green IDC and taking a healthy and green sustainable development path.

Zhang Daguang pointed out, "In fact, the construction of a green data center mainly depends on the joint action of three parts. The first one is the improvement of the energy-saving technology of the server itself. For example, adopting a CPU with more advanced process technology can improve stronger performance under the same energy consumption. The second one is the cooling mode of the server itself. The liquid submersion cooling server cluster adopted by Hotwon no longer uses the traditional mechanical cooling system, and PUE (power usage effectiveness) can approach the theoretical limit of 1.1. However, at present, the cost is relatively high, and it is still difficult to popularize on a large scale. The third aspect lies in the energy-saving design of IDC itself, that is, the choice of air conditioning cooling mode. At present, most IDCs adopt the cooling technology of water-cooling chilled water units. On one hand, this technology is relatively mature, more adaptable and not limited by regional conditions. In addition, some natural cooling and other cooling technologies are also being explored.”

In addition, Lyu Tianwen, secretary general of Green Data Center Technology Committee (GDCT) of China Electronic Energy Saving Technology Association (CEESTA), believes that data resources will be an important indicator in the future national competition. Hotwon has been building IDCs with reference to green energy-saving standards, creating a number of large-scale A-class cloud computing bases with green energy-saving and high availability. Among them, Chengdu No.1 cloud computing base of Hotwon designed by Zhang Daguang has been rated as a diamond five-star certified computer room by China Mobile IDC.

Nowadays, the digital economy has become the new driving force of my economic growth. As a young leader in IDC industry, Hotwon has attracted the top industry experts like Mr. Zhang Daguang and a large number of IDC design elites. They actively participate in the Internet infrastructure layout of Hotwon and IDC core asset project construction, and they will escort the data era together with Hotwon in the future.