.ZTE and Tencent claim that their new containerised data centre has world-beating levels of energy efficiency. The collaboration between telco ZTE and internet company Tencent has delivered, they claim, a data center with an overall power usage effectiveness (PUE) level of 1.0665 (including photovoltaic gains).
The figure is based on tests carried out by the China Academy of Telecommunication Research (CATR). and puts ZTE and Tencent in the position of leading international standards for construction of a green data center.
According to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the annual power consumption of China’s data centre industry exceeds 1.5 percent of the total power consumption of the whole of China. This is creating an urgency to initiate further industry-leading green and energy-saving data centre projects as the PUE of the majority of China’s data centres is higher than 2.2 – while global average for data centres is around 1.7 according to the 2014 data from the Uptime Institute.
According to the two partners, The West Lab data center uses a unique power supply combination of solar photovoltaic & high-voltage, direct current (HVDC) & mains power. With respect to cooling, the project is the first in China to put indirect evaporative free cooling technology into a business application. The energy efficiency ratio (EER) achieved by this method can reach 16.0, which is five times the efficiency of conventional mechanical compression cooling air-conditioning systems.If these claims are accurate, the project has realised environmental protection and energy saving goals while also ensuring low operation costs and low carbon emissions.
Using a prefabricated container approach the equipment can be installed within two weeks after being shipped to the site. Equipment can be assembled and deployed in ‘mobile mode’ to enable a fully transportable, mobile green and energy-saving data centre.
Data center development in China has accelerated in recent times with over 400,000 data centers operating in China today. China Telecom, the largest internet data center provider, has over 320 commercial facilities available for lease, followed by China Unicom, with approximately 220, according to research company DCDi.
Carriers are developing the next generation of cloud data centers in western and northern China, such as Inner Mongolia and Guizhou. China is now an evolved data center market, outstripping the other markets with which it has traditionally been associated – India, Russia and Brazil.
