[Shenzhen China, March 9, 2021] As remote work, online education, and live broadcasting are becoming increasingly prevalent, we enter an era of digitalization and digital transformation is gaining momentum in various industries. Data centers are the foundation of digital transformation, and facing growth opportunities, brought by China's "New Infrastructure” policy.
Huawei Launch Top 10 Trends of Data Center Facilities
The new era presents both opportunities and challenges. Only by gaining insight into future trends can we lead the future. Today, Mr. Fei Zhenfu, president of the data center facility domain of Huawei Digital Power Product Line, released the "Top 10 Trends of Data Center Facilities" and discussed the future opportunities with industry guests, media friends, and operator partners, contributing for the healthy development of the industry.
Top 10 Trends of Data Center Facilities
Trend 1: Zero Carbon DC
As the most critical mission shared around the globe, carbon neutrality urges for a green revolution. Green power, such as wind energy and solar energy, will be more widely used in data centers. Maximizing resource (such as energy, footprint, water, and material) saving will be essential in the entire life cycle of data centers. In the large data center facility, thermal energy recovery is a new energy saving solution. Data center PUE will enter the 1.0x Era, and "zero carbon" DCs will be a reality in the near future.
Trend 2: High Density
In next five years, IT devices will evolve toward higher computing power and density, and the CPU and server power will continue to increase. In addition, AI computing power will grow with the demand for AI applications. To balance efficiency and cost, data centers will develop to high density. It is estimated that by 2025, diversified computing power collaboration will become the mainstream, and mainstream cloud data centers will form a hybrid deployment of 15–30 kW/cabinet.
Trend 3: Scalable
The lifecycle of IT devices is generally 3 to 5 years, and the power density is roughly doubled every 5 years. The lifecycle of data center infrastructure is 10 to 15 years. The infrastructure must support elastic architecture and phased investment, and meet the power evolution requirements of two to three generations of IT devices with the optimal CAPEX. In addition, the data center must be flexible designed to support hybrid deployment of IT devices with different power density, achieving on-demand capacity expansion and space saving.
Trend 4: Fast Deployment
With the surge of Internet services in a short span of time, rapid deployment becomes essential. In addition, to meet the diverse application requirements of the cloud, data centers need to shift from support systems to production systems and be rolled out as quickly as possible. In the future, the data center TTM will be reduced from 9–12 months to 6 months or even 3 months.
Trend 5: Simple Architecture
To address the slow construction of traditional data centers and high initial investment costs, simplified system-level and data center-level architectures will become the mainstream. The DC power supply and cooling architecture evolves from the traditional architecture to integrated link-level converged products. With the prefabricated and modular design, the data center features fast deployment, elastic capacity expansion, simple O&M, and efficient energy saving.
Trend 6: Lithium for All
Traditional data center power supply systems are complicated and hard to maintain, occupy large footprint, and suffer from frequent accidents such as fire. With the trend of lithium for all we are replacing the traditional batteries with lithium batteries and phasing out lead-acid batteries. The decreasing battery cost will drive data centers soon all be lithium-based. Compared with traditional lead-acid batteries, lithium batteries have twice the life span, occupies 1/3 footprint and have enhanced visibility. Additionally, the three level BMS and LFP material lithium batteries ensure high security and reliability.
Trend 7: Air In and Water Out
Facing carbon neutrality goals, traditional chilled water systems will be replaced due to its complex O&M and high PUE. In addition, cooling systems with less or no water will become the mainstream. The modular Indirect Evaporative Cooling system adopts an integrated product design, which shortens deployment time and simplifies O&M. Utilizing free cooling resources will greatly reduce the power consumption of the cooling system.
Trend 8: Fully Digitalized
With the increasing digital transformation, digital, communications, and AI technologies are becoming prevalent. Digital twin technologies will become more widely used throughout the lifecycle of the data center from planning, construction, maintenance, and optimization, making All-DC visible, manageable, and controllable in the entire lifecycle.
Trend 9: AI Enabled
With the continuous improvement and widespread application of IoT and AI technologies, data centers will gradually shift from manual operation such as repetitive work, expert experience, and business decision-making to AI based autonomous driving. Data centers will evolve from single-domain intelligence such as O&M, energy saving, and operation to full-lifecycle digitalization and autonomous driving for the planning, construction, O&M, and optimization. AI energy efficiency optimization, real-time parameter adjustment, AI O&M, 24/7 inspection, predictive maintenance, AI operation, online simulation, and automatic service design will all become a reality.
Trend 10: Secure and Reliable
As data center infrastructures become more intelligent, network security threats are multiplied. The data center must implement system-level, component-level, and device-level predictive maintenance. The data center must have six features: hardware reliability, software security, system resilience, security, privacy, and always online availability. Hierarchical defense ensures data center security and trustworthiness.
Huawei Data Center Facility has made breakthroughs in products and technologies. Through the cooperation with industry customers, partners, and third-party organizations, Huawei strives to build an open, cooperative, win-win industry ecosystem. Looking forward, Huawei will continuously implement the concept of green and sustainable development, helping achieve the goal of carbon neutrality.
