Green data center will bring mature solutions to the education industry

The author presses: According to IDC estimates, from the perspective of operating cost control, in the IT industry, energy consumption costs have reached 25% of its hardware procurement costs. The data is rising at a compound annual growth rate of 52%. When enterprises and large and medium-sized organizations are faced with changing business pressure and exponentially increasing data, they need to give sufficient consideration and attention to the environmental protection and energy saving features of data centers.

At the same time, various products in the field of enterprise data centers have also been labeled with "green energy saving", and various new technologies with "green energy saving" as the selling point are also emerging in an endless stream. So whether these new technologies and new products can be used for enterprises To build a truly "green and energy-saving" data center? How do enterprise CIOs and data center managers view the problem of "green energy saving" in data centers?

IT168 will launch a series of interviews for CIOs and data center managers of key industries in the near future, and will discuss with the enterprise CIOs and data center managers about the views of data center "green energy saving" trends and attempts at data center "green energy saving" And practice. Recently, the reporter connected with the official director of the Information Management Department of New Oriental Education Technology Group to conduct interviews on topics such as the construction of green data centers in the education industry.

New Oriental is the first educational institution in mainland China to be listed in the United States

The domestic green data center still has a long way to go

Reporter: How do you view and understand the development trend of "green energy saving" in data centers, do you think it is concept hype or the general trend? Based on your company's current data center operations, what position do you think the "green data center" is in?

Guan Chong: The trend of green energy saving in data centers is not only to respond to the national call for “energy saving and emission reduction”, but also to comply with various compliance and safety requirements; at the same time, it is also in the interest of the enterprise itself because of high energy consumption costs and downtime Business risks put a lot of pressure on companies. If you do not pay attention to the energy consumption of the data center, it is easy to form a vicious circle. This vicious circle reminds us that we cannot ignore the importance of green energy saving all the time. Therefore, it can be said that the green data center is a top priority related to the safe, stable and rapid development of enterprises.

In terms of the operation of New Oriental Data Center, many devices, large power consumption, large heat dissipation, and insufficient equipment utilization are more realistic problems. There is still a long way to go in the direction of green data center development.

Director of Information Management Department of New Oriental Education Technology Group

Reporter: What is the scale of your company ’s current IT applications? Such as: the number of servers, the number of terminals, whether there are branches? How many branches? What are the main applications? What is the amount of data? Is there storage? What is the network architecture?

Official Chong: At present, under the New Oriental Group (600811, share it), including branches around the country, there are about 60 in total. The number of servers should be more than 250, and the number of terminals is more than 10,000. Its functions are mainly concentrated in office, e-mail, financial accounting, salary management, scheduling registration system and website system, etc. The total amount of key data is about 20TB. At present, storage in New Oriental begins to occupy a certain amount of weight, about 10 sets of levels, but the performance level of storage devices is still at a low initial stage. New Oriental has initially completed the interconnection of cross-regional network services through Internet VPN. At the same time, there are already three IDC computer rooms in Beijing, including self-built computer rooms.

Reporter: Do you understand the utilization rate of your company's data center? Such as: the respective utilization rate of server, storage, network, etc.? Are there any idle resources and equipment?

Guan Chong: The utilization rate of data centers has always been a relatively contradictory issue in data center departments. As far as New Oriental is concerned, this problem also exists. During the business idle period and the development and testing period, the equipment and load idleness are relatively large. At the same time, because the storage network has not been officially applied, the storage utilization rate is also low.

Reporter: How is the energy consumption of your company's data center? The proportion of energy cost in IT expenditure? What are the approximate proportions of energy consumption of servers, networks, storage, and security?

Guan Chong: Among the energy consumption of our data centers, the power used for IT equipment accounts for about 1/3 of the total power consumption. About 40% of the maintenance cost is occupied by energy consumption, among which cooling accounts for 50% -70% of the energy consumption. The increase in energy consumption brings heat, and the increase in heat also expands energy consumption. In addition, greater heat density increases these effects.

Use virtualization to adapt to the new data center environment

Reporter: Has your company tried anything in virtualization? What do you think are the outstanding effects of implementing virtualization in the "green data center"? Can data be used to illustrate the value of virtualization in improving utilization and energy saving?

Guan Chong: We have also begun to try virtualization, from server virtualization, storage virtualization, to gradually explore how to better achieve data center virtualization. By virtualizing servers and storage, our equipment redundancy is reduced by approximately 20% and power consumption is reduced by approximately 30%. In the implementation of virtualization, we found that before starting a virtualization project, we should focus on improving the performance management and process management capabilities so that we can keep up with the needs of the new data center environment.

Reporter: In addition to virtualization, what other "green data center" specific measures has your company tried?

Guan Chong: Equipment, technology, planning and management are all necessary links to realize a green data center. Technically, methods including virtualization, automation, and intelligence, as well as cloud computing applications, etc. can be used. On the device, such as the use of low-power chips, blade servers, etc., to meet the application needs with the lowest power consumption. From the perspective of the operation and maintenance of the computer room, the effective application and management of the efficient BMS system will greatly improve the operation and maintenance efficiency of the data center.

How do companies build green data centers?

Reporter: Do you know what products and technologies manufacturers have launched for "green data centers"? In products and solutions for green data centers, such as green customized servers, deduplication, disk speed reduction, cloud computing, energy consumption monitoring software, etc.? Which do you know more about? Which ones would you consider adopting?

Guan Chong: IBM, HP, EMC and other manufacturers have green data center technologies, products and solutions. We are all interested in understanding and applying them based on our own characteristics and specific conditions.

Reporter: Based on your experience, what difficulties and bottlenecks have you encountered when trying to practice the "green data center"? Is there a solution? What can the manufacturer or us do to help you?

Guan Chong: At present, when we try to practice the "green data center", the biggest problem is that it is difficult to measure the effect of "green" in a short time, and second, it is difficult to measure the effect of "green" very accurately. Especially in the process of implementing the "green data center" as a large-scale system project, the initial manpower, material resources, and capital investment are often very large, and it takes some time to measure the long-term cost.

There are certain risks in green data centers

Reporter: According to your understanding, are there any successful cases of green data centers in your industry and circles? Do these cases have any influence or reference for you? At the same time, have your attempts and practices in the green data center affected other companies or companies?

Guan Chong: As far as the education industry is concerned, the IT development process is slow. At present, the education industry is not very large in terms of the use of data centers. It is really beginning to consider the adoption of green concepts for the construction and transformation of data centers. However, with the development of the education industry in recent years, green data centers will bring more mature and holistic solutions to the entire education industry. For example, Taobao is currently using low-energy server clusters and dynamic load distribution technologies to respond. Problems in data center equipment utilization and business peak idle time.

Building a green data center faces many risks

In addition, the application of the virtualization technology currently adopted by New Oriental Group will also bring energy-saving solutions during the IT development period of education companies for other institutions in the group or educational institutions in the same industry.

Reporter: Do you think there are any problems and bottlenecks in popularizing "green data centers"? What is it?

Guan Chong: The technology including virtualization and cloud computing should be popularized. The cost in the early stage is relatively large, and the implementation effect in the later stage varies from person to person. This has certain risks, so it becomes a problem.

At the same time, green data centers have slightly different management and maintenance requirements for traditional data center technologies. Therefore, the technical learning and mastering of related maintenance personnel and developers will also require a longer transformation process.

Reporter: Share and summarize your experience and suggestions in implementing a green data center?

Guan Chong: The implementation of a green data center should start with one point and one line, including the green of a chip, and gradually accumulate implementation experience; at the same time, when building a new data center, we must fully consider each in the planning Link energy saving, redundancy and scalability.

Therefore, in the implementation process, as close as possible to the business characteristics of their own industries and enterprises, before the implementation, fully investigate the characteristics of business needs, master the data center can optimize the resource part, instead of directly purchasing equipment with green capabilities, and later on Optimization, so that the entire system is based on the premise of energy saving and consumption reduction but can also guarantee business, I believe that the data center built in this way must have green capabilities.

About the green data center:

Green Data Center (Green Data Center) refers to IT systems, machinery, lighting and electrical in the data room that can maximize energy efficiency and minimize environmental impact. Green data center is the inevitable development of data center. In general, we can measure whether a data center is "green" in terms of building energy efficiency, operation management, and energy efficiency. The "green" of the green data center is embodied in the overall design planning and application of IT equipment and management software such as computer room air conditioners, UPS, servers, etc. It must have energy saving and environmental protection, high reliability availability and reasonableness.

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