Modular data centers divide large data centers into several independent areas (modules). The construction scale, power load, and resource configuration of each area are designed and constructed according to unified standards. As the demand for IT equipment continues to grow, independent modules can be added gradually as needed, enabling rapid construction and replication of existing data centers.
Currently, public transportation, logistics, and tax departments each have their own data centers, with fixed resources and applications. If a department's equipment becomes overloaded, the only solution is to add more equipment to expand capacity. However, with cloud computing data centers, resources and applications are shared and dynamically allocated. When a department is overloaded, it can share idle resources from other departments without needing to add additional equipment. Therefore, compared to traditional data centers, this effectively reduces hardware and maintenance costs by over 40%, and by improving equipment utilization through cloud computing equipment and software, effectively reducing energy consumption by over 20%, thus comprehensively reducing the IT construction costs for governments and enterprises.
Five major advantages of modular data centers:
1. High density and intelligent advantages
With societal development, the volume of data is growing rapidly, leading to increasingly higher data center densities. While past data centers were characterized by decentralized and small-scale layouts, the rise of big data and cloud computing will result in a proliferation of large-scale data centers, leading to ever-increasing heat density per server rack. Modular data center solutions offer industry-leading cloud computing solutions, including cloud-based IT equipment such as servers, storage, and networks. These solutions utilize customizable servers designed for high performance and cloud computing, employing intelligent cloud computing operation and management platforms to fully realize unified management, deployment, monitoring, and backup of data center resources.
Traditional data centers use underfloor air supply, with 1-2 air outlets per rack. Each outlet has an air volume of 500-800 m³/h. Assuming a 12°C supply and return air temperature difference, the maximum cooling capacity of a single rack is 3kW-5kW, which cannot solve the heat dissipation problem of high-density servers and is insufficient to meet the heat dissipation requirements of high-density racks with a single rack power of 5kW or more.
Modular data centers employ a solution of horizontal air supply from in-row air conditioners and enclosed cold/hot aisles. Supply and return air are both located within a small area, and airflow organization does not interfere with each other. Each in-row air conditioner and several nearby server racks can be considered as a cooling unit, which can greatly improve cooling efficiency. In-row air conditioners deliver cooling capacity directly to server racks through point-to-point precise cooling, ensuring support for the cooling capacity of high-density data centers, and supporting a maximum power of over 10kW per rack.
2. Advantages of on-demand deployment and flexible expansion
my country's demand for IT equipment is on the rise, and data center businesses are developing rapidly. Often, newly built and operational data centers become insufficient to meet demand within one or two years. Traditional data centers face significant challenges in later expansion due to lack of installation or extremely difficult installation, leading to redundant construction and substantial wasted investment. Modular data centers, on the other hand, primarily consist of a series of modularly designed power equipment, such as uninterruptible power supplies, cooling systems, racks, and remote monitoring systems. These modules are combined through simple interfaces to form a complete data center. Regardless of a company's current size or industry, it can customize a modular data center to meet its specific needs and gradually expand its scale as business grows to accommodate increasing IT demands. This means that companies can have several times the computing power in the future without affecting the functionality or design of their existing data centers. This is its most attractive feature.
3. Construction time advantage
Traditional data centers typically take months or even years to plan and complete, which is incompatible with the rapid upgrade cycle of IT equipment. Often, after a long construction period, traditional data centers are put into use but quickly become unable to adapt to the latest IT equipment development needs.
Compared to building or expanding traditional data centers, modular data centers have shorter deployment times, taking only a dozen weeks from design to full deployment, and they also save on land area. This is partly because they integrate a large amount of power infrastructure, requiring only the addition of corresponding IT equipment to be operational. Furthermore, the modular design facilitates site selection; as long as resources such as water, electricity, and network are available, the location of a modular data center is not picky, such as in a company office building, warehouse, or even a parking lot. This is undoubtedly good news for CIOs who frequently face project deadlines.
Modular data centers integrate power distribution systems, cooling systems, monitoring systems, server racks and their structural systems (including server racks, supporting structural components, ceilings, cable trays, and cold aisles, etc.). By combining the relevant modules through simple interfaces, a complete data center is formed.
4. Operating cost advantages
Modular data centers can also help businesses rationally control IT costs. With the increasing popularity of cloud computing and the rapid growth of internet applications, as organizations deploy more servers and storage devices to meet the ever-growing demand for data storage, energy consumption and costs have reached unprecedented levels. "The energy cost of data centers will increasingly exceed the hardware purchase cost" has become an unavoidable issue for data center managers.
Modular data centers help users reduce costs during the initial construction phase through modular and customized design, and control energy consumption through centralized management of IT facilities during the later operation phase. In addition, this construction approach can help enterprise users improve space and equipment utilization, reduce unnecessary human resource consumption, and thus effectively control the overall operating costs of the data center.
5. Green and energy-saving advantages
Traditional data centers focus on the temperature of the entire physical server room, which is 23±1℃ as required by design specifications. Modular data centers, on the other hand, focus on the inlet temperature of IT equipment, rather than the temperature of the entire physical server room. Within the temperature range that ensures the normal operation of servers, increasing the intake air temperature of the server racks can reduce the energy consumption of the cooling system and use the effective cooling capacity on IT equipment. This can significantly reduce the cooling energy consumption of the air conditioning and improve the cooling efficiency.
Traditional data centers suffer from severe mixing of hot and cold air, uneven temperature gradients, and significant local hot spots, resulting in substantial energy waste. Modular data centers, on the other hand, utilize a closed-loop construction method to effectively isolate hot and cold aisles, avoid ineffective heat exchange, and enable precise point-to-point cooling through in-row air conditioning, thereby significantly improving energy efficiency.
In summary, considering the five advantages mentioned above, as global large-scale data centers place increasingly higher demands on construction cycle, construction cost, operation and maintenance costs, flexible expansion, high density, intelligence, and low energy consumption, modular data centers, as a next-generation data center solution, will become the future development trend of data centers.
