New Value Together: Make Any Room a Data Centre

This is a fully connected, intelligent world, where data is a key asset. As services expand, the volume of global data will increase from 44 ZB in 2020 to 180 ZB by 2025. Data centres are increasingly important to the global digital economy. Digital transformation adds pressure to public sector, along with finance, energy, and transportation industries, which are also coping with the uncertainty brought by these service upgrades. Given the ubiquity of data, can data centre infrastructure, as a carrier of data and storage resources, also become pervasive and easily accessible?

Huawei

The Huawei FusionModule2000@SmartLi UPS data centre solution redefines how data is physically stored. Site selection is now much faster with looser requirements of room size and load bearing capacity. Equipment rooms can now be easily modified to meet the need – even common office buildings or warehouses can be transformed into data centres.

The average room height of a common building is 2.6 metres. However, a traditional data centre requires raised floors and cable trays, taking the minimum height required to 3 metres. Huawei FusionModule2000 adopts a more flexible design with air conditioner drainpipes and electric/extra low voltage (ELV) cables routed from the top. No raised floor is required. Even a building with a room height of 2.6 m can easily be turned into a data centre. As lithium batteries are lighter, the load bearing capacity of Huawei SmartLi is less than 1000 kg/m². This lower weight meets the load bearing requirements for Tier III and Tier IV data centres in TIA942.

Unlike traditional lead-acid batteries, SmartLi UPS and IT equipment can be deployed in the same room. Lithium batteries are also smaller. With a standard of 125 kW and 20 minutes of backup power, four battery cabinets are required using lead-acid batteries. It is only one cabinet necessary when Huawei SmartLi is applied. With this setting – no additional power backup is required – the footprint is lowered by 75%.

The FusionModule2000 has a modular design, meaning all subsystems of the data centre infrastructure can be integrated in one-stop mode. This lowers the cost associated with conventional project management, which usually involves multiple vendors, systems, and roles. Moreover, this solution implements vendor pre-test and pre-commissioning, vastly reducing the risks of onsite delivery, commissioning quality, and delivery progress.

Fast Service Rollout at INVITE Systems SRL by Turning a Canteen into a Data Centre

Founded in 2000, Romania-based INVITE Systems SRL provides digital hosting services. It has been a pioneer among the country’s network service providers by implementing “hosting services.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a surge in online services such as games, videos, and live streaming, as well as daily access traffic in Romania. As a result, the company’s original platform could no longer meet all its customers’ requirements. INVITE Systems SRL had to launch a data centre quickly to satisfy the pressing needs of its enterprise customers.

It typically takes a long time to re-plan and approve the land use of a data centre. And it usually requires joint projects by multiple vendors, making this task even more complex and time consuming.

Ultimately, the company scouted a 20-square-metre canteen as a potential space for a data centre. Even though it was solid enough, it did not quite meet the requirements of a traditional data centre, both in terms of room height and load bearing capacity.

Huawei’s FusionModule2000 smart modular data centre solution is an easy fix for INVITE Systems SRL. This solution features a fully modular and integrated design which does not require high floors or raised floors. The canteen was reconstructed into a data centre for a fast service rollout. With SmartLi UPS inside, the power density of each module of the UPS reached 50 kVA/3 U, while the overall footprint was only 1.19 m², while also reducing the footprint by 70%. The entire power distribution system occupied a tiny kitchen space, while the main area had sufficient enough space for IT equipment.

“From preparation to installation and then to commissioning, Huawei FusionModule2000 shortened the launch time of our new data centre by more than two months,” said Alexandru Catrin, CIO of INVITE Systems SRL. “Onsite deployment was completed within one month, which was beyond our expectations.”

Macao IAM Turning an Office Area into a Modern and Scalable Data Centre

Meanwhile in Macao, without any available traditional standard data centre, its Municipal Affairs Bureau (IAM) needed to build a data centre in a new office area to support municipal construction, public service handling, citizen education, and the public media relationship services of the government cloud. The new data centre had to be scalable for future mainstream industry requirements for security, reliability, and manageability.

The FusionModule2000 integrates the power supply and distribution system, cooling system, monitoring system, cabinet aisles, and the cabling system. Compared to the heavy engineering required for a traditional data centre, the modular design and prefabrication can shorten the construction period by 50%. This means a pre-existing office area could easily be converted to a data centre. Huawei has also integrated AI technologies into data centres to solve operation problems during the facility’s 10-year life cycle. The IAM adopted the data centre O&M system DCIM + to equip the FusionModule2000 with an intelligent “brain.” A range of digital and intelligent technologies were used by core subsystems to improve system efficiency, reliability, and availability.

As the industry’s first data centre product that has passed the Uptime Tier-IV Ready certification, Huawei FusionModule2000 occupies 19.1% of the market share, ranking No. 1 in the global market (source: Frost & Sullivan, 2019).

Data centres were a hot topic at the fifth HUAWEI CONNECT, which took place in Shanghai on September 23-26. Top-notch experts and industrial elites shared their insights in a series of conferences and roundtables. Huawei also demonstrated its cutting-edge technologies, plus a wide range of renowned products and solutions designed to help enterprises succeed with digital transformation.