Huawei recently held a conference on the Top 10 Trends of Data Center Facility in 2024 and released a corresponding White Paper. At the conference, Yao Quan, President of Huawei Data Center Facility Domain, defined the three characteristics of future data centres: reliable, simplified and sustainable.
Trend 1: High-reliability products and professional services are the key to ensuring secure and reliable data centre operation
The concept of ‘full-chain safety’ must be implemented throughout product design and manufacturing. By providing professional deployment and O&M services, it can reduce product failure rates, minimise post-disaster impacts and improve the end-to-end assurance mechanism.
Trend 2: Distributed cooling architecture will become a better choice for ensuring cooling safety
In contrast to the centralised cooling architecture, the distributed cooling architecture is more flexible in the sense that subsystems are independent of each other, and faults of a single device exert no impact on the operation of other devices.
Trend 3: Predictive maintenance will become a basic feature of data centre infrastructure
Data centre maintenance is usually performed after an event. However, with the advent of the intelligent computing era, maintenance after an event will be replaced by maintenance before an event. The service life of vulnerable components, thermal runaway of devices and leakage of the cooling system can be predicted to prevent accidents.
Trend 4: The lifecycle network security protection system will become a shield of data centre facility
As digital and intelligent technologies keep advancing, network attacks are occurring more frequently. Software security must be built upon a lifecycle network security protection system from three dimensions: supply security, in-depth defence and O&M/operation security.
Trend 5: The prefabricated and modular solution will become an optimal choice for high-quality and fast delivery
Compared with traditional construction, the prefabricated and modular solution features a shorter construction period and higher quality. It ensures high-quality onsite delivery and fast service rollout, and significantly reduces waste brought by onsite construction.
Trend 6: Professional management platform makes data centre O&M more secure and efficient
Data centres are presenting a trend to scale up in an intensive manner. Consequently, the complexity of overall O&M increases dramatically. A professional management platform can significantly improve the O&M efficiency and accuracy of data centres.
Trend 7: The convergence of air and liquid cooling becomes the preferred architecture in uncertain service requirements scenarios
The industry is transitioning from general-purpose computing to intelligent computing. Scenarios supported by general-purpose computing and intelligent computing may exist in a data centre. Therefore, the convergence of air and liquid cooling will become a preferred architecture, where the proportion of air cooling and liquid cooling can be adjusted to flexibly adapt to different needs.
Trend 8: Indirect evaporative cooling is still the best refrigeration scheme now and in the future
Considering cooling sources, the indirect evaporative cooling system has obvious advantages over the chilled water system in terms of architecture, efficiency and O&M. The distributed cooling architecture of an indirect evaporative cooling system effectively prevents single-point failures. By maximising the utilisation of free cooling sources, only one heat exchange is required. In cold regions, compressors can stay dormant the majority of the time, achieving optimal PUE.
Trend 9: To further reduce PUE, the optimal solution is to shift the focus on efficient components to system engineering optimisation
Traditional data centres focus on improving the efficiency of equipment. However, due to physical limitations, the efficiency improvement of components is about to hit a bottleneck. Therefore, the focus on efficient components should be shifted to system engineering optimisation, with the S-ECO mode as an example.
Trend 10: AI optimisation will become the optimal choice for intelligent optimisation of energy efficiency for existing data centres
In contrast to traditional ways, the AI energy efficiency optimisation solution optimises the energy efficiency of existing data centres with pre-set AI algorithms and Big Data models. In addition, as AI optimisation does not rely on the expertise of relevant personnel, it features fast optimisation and excellent effects.
Huawei will insist on creating reliable, simplified and sustainable data centre facility products and solutions to help customers and partners build green and reliable infrastructure for computing by enabling each Watt to drive more computing power, as part of its efforts to power the digital era forward.
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