At present, the data centers of operators and financial industry are the “big head” of national data centers, and operators are also the main force to “move” data from the east to the West. As the national team and main force in the construction of digital information infrastructure, operators are duty bound to support the “Eastern digital Western computing” in the “Eastern digital Western computing” project. Operators not only need to support it, but also hope to use the east wind of “Eastern digital Western computing” to promote the upgrading of their networks to computing networks and take the lead in the computing era.
China United Network Communications Limited(600050) Gui’an data center is the largest single modular data center in Asia, with an investment of 6 billion yuan. It has always been a national information disaster recovery and backup base. Since it was put into use, the utilization rate of cabinet has reached 55%. When the reporter interviewed in 2021, the main function here is data backup. This is a data center with a high “shelf rate” in the West.
China Telecom Corporation Limited(601728) Tianfu cloud computing center is located in Chengdu Tianfu new area, where a large number of videos from SD to HD collected by Sichuan Telecom’s “insight” service converge. Insight business puts video information on the cloud. In a case of burglary, robbery and murder, even if the suspect smashed the camera, the police still locked the suspect according to the video stored on the cloud. This business is very popular, but the data center should be under pressure, because as we all know, the amount of video data increases very fast, just like our mobile phone memory is always occupied by video very quickly. This is the data center in the central area with active data volume.
China Mobile (Yangtze River Delta) Nanjing data center is located in Nanjing Jiangbei national new area, with a cumulative investment of more than 20 billion yuan. The park covers an area of 104 Mu and can carry 18000 racks and 300000 servers. It is currently the largest data center in a single Park in East China. It carries the network information services of China Mobile’s network cloud core network in 6 provinces and 1 city in East China, and provides the society with the Internet (Tencent, Alibaba, Suning, etc.), digital Finance ( Huatai Securities Co.Ltd(601688) , rural credit cooperatives, etc.), digital government and other national economy and people’s livelihood computing services. This is the data center in the area with extremely active data volume in the East.
Driven by the market, the layout of data centers tends to be in areas with high economic development level and large data flow. According to CCID Consulting data, the number of racks in use in data centers in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and surrounding areas accounts for more than 50% of the number of racks in use in China, and the shelf rate of data centers in some first and second tier cities can reach 60% ~ 80%, or even higher. Although the central and western regions have an obvious trend to undertake the transfer of data centers in the East in recent years, the shelf rate of some provinces (regions and cities) is still less than 30%.
Suanli network wants to take advantage of the east wind
Before the launch of the East West computing project, from the first half of 2020 to the middle of 2021, the state issued a series of policies focusing on the computing power of the data center, forming the concept of multi-level and integrated national echelon layout of the data center with “East West computing” as the core. In 2021, the four departments issued the implementation plan of computing hub of collaborative innovation system of national integrated big data center, and put forward the architecture of “4 + 4” national hub node + provincial node + edge node; Subsequently, the Ministry of industry and information technology issued the three-year action plan for the development of new data centers (20212023).
Tang Xiongyan, vice president and chief scientist of China United Network Communications Limited(600050) Research Institute, told China Electronics News that the “implementation plan of computing hub of collaborative innovation system of national integrated big data center” proposed to build a new computing network integrating data center, cloud computing and big data, which is the first time that the concept of computing network has been written into the national document. Of course, the computing network mentioned here is more from the perspective of data center and computing power, It refers to the networked computing infrastructure.
“According to the calculation of the China Academy of communications and communications, every percentage point increase in the scale of computing power in China during 20162020 will drive the growth of digital economy by 0.4 percentage points and GDP by 0.2 percentage points. It can be said that whether the ‘Foundation’ of computing power is consolidated or not is related to whether the ‘building’ of digital economy can stand tall.” Feng Jie, general manager of China Telecom Corporation Limited(601728) cloud network development department, proposed that the national integrated big data center system should cover five subsystems: digital network, digital button, digital chain, digital brain and digital shield. These five subsystems correspond to five aspects: Data Center cluster layout, computing power scheduling system, data circulation, data application and security capacity-building.
Zhang Hao, director of network and it Technology Research Institute of China Mobile Research Institute, said: “On the one hand, the computing power network can break through the performance limit of single point computing power through the advantages of network cluster, give play to the scale effect of computing power, open up the aorta of computing from the east to the west, and strengthen the microcirculation of edge computing power; on the other hand, the computing power network can be used to form integrated services with the integration of computing power, network, artificial intelligence, blockchain and other elements, so as to stimulate the Paradigm Innovation of computing power services.”
“The concept of computing power network was put forward in 2019 and China United Network Communications Limited(600050) released the first white paper of computing power network. Computing power network hopes to embed computing units and computing power into communication network, realize efficient collaboration among cloud, network, edge, end and industry, and improve the utilization rate of computing resources.” Tang Xiongyan said, “in the computing power network, users do not need to care about the location and deployment status of computing resources in the network, but only about the services they get.”
Computing power network is the network strategy of operators for the next decade. From the perspective of “computing” and “network”, the monopoly advantage of operators is network. From the perspective of “calculation”, among the 44 national green data centers in 2021 just identified recently, there are 14 operators, nearly 1 / 3 Other data centers come from major manufacturers such as Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, byte beating and Huawei, as well as data center enterprises such as century Internet, as well as data centers suitable for vertical industries such as banking and energy. This is also the current situation of the source of computing power in China. The value of computing power network lies in the integration of computing power and network. Now the major users of computing power are Internet manufacturers. Can operators “borrow the east wind” do as they wish?
the challenge of counting from the east to the West
At present, the data center in the East is very hot, but the data center in the west is relatively “cold data”, which is mainly used for backup and storage; The purpose of counting the East and counting the west is to let the data from the east flow to the West for calculation and analysis. It is not only storage and backup, but also to balance the computing power. Many fast-growing places in the East are building big data centers, urban brains, cloud brains, etc. to support artificial intelligence. There are many data sources and many data types. What changes will the East digital West computing project make compared with the previous use of the West Data Center for storage and backup?
“The goal of the East digital West computing project is quite different from the simple remote backup of data in the past. We should balance the computing power, connect the computing power resources from the two dimensions of time and space, let the west give full play to the cost and scale advantages of computing resources, and fully revitalize and release the computing power. This requires the synergy of multiple factors such as network, data center, computing platform, application and operation mode.” Tang Xiongyan said, “of course, not all applications are suitable for computing from the east to the West. Many applications, such as industrial control, Internet of vehicles, financial transactions and urban brain, have strict requirements for time delay or data localization and must complete the calculation nearby. Therefore, there is still a large market demand for intelligent data centers and edge data centers in eastern cities.
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Of course, the implementation of integrated computing and network services still faces many challenges. Tang Xiongyan said that the business scenario of East digital West computing is not clear, the computing network technology and service standards are not perfect, and the multi-party open sharing of computing resources still needs to be explored.
In terms of computing network technology and service standards, computing industry and network industry are two industries with great differences. Both technical standards and industrial promotion need active cooperation between them. Technical problems such as computing power measurement and trading, network perception and routing, and joint adjustment and arrangement of computing network still need to be tackled by the industry. In the open sharing of computing power resources, there are still many technical and commercial problems to be solved, such as how to ensure the enthusiasm of multi-party participation through computing power trading, and how to provide differentiated network support for different computing power providers.
Zhang Hao said that only using the western data center for storage and backup did not realize the effective flow of data in the eastern and Western data centers, nor did it make full use of the energy and environmental advantages of the western region. At present, China’s data centers still face three main problems: first, the uneven development between the East and the West; Second, the overall energy consumption of data centers is high. The average pue of China’s super large data centers is about 1.46, and many old data centers have pue higher than 2, which is still a certain gap from the pue of new data centers required by the three-year action plan for the development of new data centers (20212023) of the Ministry of industry and information technology; Third, the intelligent computing level of most data centers needs to be improved. With the development of AI, big data and other industries, the demand of the whole society for scientific computing, image rendering and VR / XR will increase significantly. The intelligent computing power represented by GPU and NPU will become the mainstream computing power, which needs to be further strengthened in this regard.
six opportunities for operators
Eastern digital Western computing needs both policy driven and application and business driven. It is necessary to judge which business and data are suitable for Eastern digital Western computing or under what kind of business incentive, so as to make full use of the computing power of the West as much as possible.
“Telecom operators have significant advantages in promoting network, computing, application global collaboration, East West computing power collaboration, cloud edge computing power collaboration and end-to-end customer service. East digital West computing will provide an important opportunity for operators to transform and upgrade to digital infrastructure service providers integrating computing and network.” Tang Xiongyan said.
Referring to the specific challenges faced by “East digital West computing” in building a new computing network system integrating data center, cloud computing and big data, Zhang Hao believes that there are challenges in realizing efficient and reliable interconnection, integrated service capability, guidance of data migration needs, cross domain integration of data, and the realization of green, low-carbon, safe and reliable data center, Operators can seize the opportunity to make a difference in these aspects.
The first is an efficient and reliable interconnection path. East digital West computing has high requirements for network delay, reliability and other indicators. The network is facing the challenges of low delay, high reliability, large bandwidth and quick opening of cross regional and cross level connections. At present, there are still some phenomena such as routing around and insufficient bandwidth between data centers. Based on the existing network advantages, operators can build all-optical direct connection paths between data center hub nodes as needed to further improve the bandwidth and transmission performance of optical networks. At the same time, they provide low delay path scheduling capability, simplify the complexity of cross domain connection and improve the deterministic guarantee capability of end-to-end networks.
The second is the challenge of integrated service capacity. Facing the highly complex computing network environment, operators can build a unified intelligent management platform for the whole network, realize the connection of resources in all fields downward, combine and encapsulate the atomic service capability of the computing network, realize the integrated service support of network, cloud, number, intelligence, security, edge, end, chain and other elements upward, and gradually realize the unified management of multi-party computing power and social computing power horizontally.
The third is the reasonable guidance of data migration needs. First, based on the demand, build the data center as needed according to the detailed planning of business scenarios and product systems to avoid blindly following the trend. Second, with the network as the auxiliary, the network side needs to be able to realize the flexible scheduling of computing network resources and the accuracy of application requirements, so as to carry out the global optimal scheduling. Third, we should take multiple measures at the same time, guide through market, technology and other means, and promote the dynamic balance between computing power and demand.
In terms of cross domain data integration, the construction of key technical indicators and application scope and other standards for the application scenarios of various industries of Eastern digital computing and Western computing is not perfect, and the cross industry general agreement standards are missing. At the same time, the definition of data ownership is still in the gray area, the relevant legislation is not perfect, and the data interfaces of different operators are not unified and fully open. It is necessary to further unify the interface and protocol standards, establish an effective data circulation system, and promote the wide sharing of data across industries and operators.
In terms of green and low-carbon, the East digital West computing project promotes the large-scale, intensive and green development of the data center. In addition to the energy consumption level of the new data center to meet the construction requirements, the stock data center is also facing a lot of optimization work. In the future, it is necessary to carry out end-to-end system level energy efficiency optimization from chips, equipment to data center, so as to effectively reduce pue in data center.
In terms of security and credibility, the National Computing hub node puts forward higher requirements for the disaster recovery and security protection ability of the data center, the anti-virus ability of the server, the anti attack ability of the network, and the anti theft and anti tampering ability in the process of data transmission. Therefore, operators can give full play to the role of central enterprises to ensure data security from the two dimensions of technology and management.
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