admin

For the maintenance of your data center to be effective, a comprehensive maintenance strategy must be in place. It includes the following:

Preventive maintenance

One of the best ways to ensure minimal amount of equipment failures and shutdowns is to perform preventive maintenance. Preventive maintenance conduct scheduled analyses to catch the defect before occurring. Having a plan in place and executing on it regularly will help avoid unplanned downtime due to battery failure, clogged air filters, and other physical causes which could lead to a crisis in critical infrastructure.
Amongst others, preventive maintenance should include checks on equipment such as switches and routers, circuit breakers, power supplies, cabling, HVAC systems, fire detection, and prevention systems.

Why is preventive maintenance important?

1. Reduces the risk of data center failure
There are high chances that your data center shuts down because of loads of data. That is why maintenance is crucial to avoid interruptions in data storage, access, and retrieval. Shutting down data centers does not only affect the accessibility of data but can also be very costly.

2. Management of operational costs
Preventive maintenance is not only about extending the lifespan of your data center but also managing operating costs. Data centers consume massive energy amounts. One way to lower operational costs is to make sure that your equipment works efficiently by solving or fixing issues in the system.

3. Preventing the risks of downtime
For data centers to keep running through unforeseeable power issues like utility spikes and power outages, most of them depend on the reliability of UPS or Uninterruptible Power Supply systems. Preventive maintenance must be in place to maximize the performance and reliability of the UPS systems by providing systematic detection and correction of failures.

4. Safety of people, equipment and facilties
Safety systems such as VESDA aspirating smoke detection (ASD) which enables early detection and mitigation of potential fire threats, must be regularly maintained for performance and reliability to avoid potential disasters which can cause injury, loss of life and equipment damage.

5. Reducing environmental impact
In the industry of data centers, sustainability must be a priority and should form an integral part of all development strategies moving forward. While the focus remains on green data center strategies, companies can strive to achieve a balance between reduced energy consumption and increased performance by prioritising preventive maintenance.

At GreenBay, we are able to assist you in your preventive maintenance measures. We have the skills and expertise to manage all the equipment that makes your critical infrastructure work. Our training and hands-on experience means that we know what to look out for, and how to handle the physical equipment and the system that runs it, as well as advise and guide you in your maintenance strategy. Get in touch with us today to make your maintenance routine work better for your data center and critical infrastructure.

For data centers, cooling systems consume the most power, and so reducing the energy consumption of cooling systems represents a first crucial step towards a greener data center. While innovation and technology has brought much advancement in the use of natural cooling sources, cooling systems need smart brains that are capable of smart adjustments and on-demand cooling with the constant changes in data center loads and their environments.

For example, China Unicom’s Henan branch (China Unicom Henan) deployed Huawei’s iCooling@AI solution which integrates big data and AI, enabling data centers to learn to save power and automatically optimize their power efficiency, improving data centers’ PUE by 8 to 15 percent.

Located in Henan’s Zhengzhou, the Central Plains Data Center is one of China Unicom’s 12 planned, ultra-large, national data centers. It’s also the only core data center in central China to be built to the T3+/T4 standard. At the start of this strategic partnership project between China Unicom and the Henan provincial government, China Unicom Henan put forward rigid energy consumption requirements for the data center. Its priority was to achieve reliability and a PUE that would be first-class both in China and globally.

In the days before the iCooling@AI solution was adopted for optimizing power efficiency, data center cooling systems were mainly configured manually. This made it difficult to achieve satisfactory results, as the load and environment were constantly changing.

In contrast, iCooling@AI can efficiently and accurately collect all data relating to a data center’s power efficiency. It then uses the deep neural network for modelling and accurately compares the created models with the data center’s operating status, which is optimized every hour. As a data center’s load increases, the cooling mode changes and the AI becomes more capable of learning. This leads to constant improvements in power saving that significantly reduce power consumption and waste.

With the adoption of the iCooling@AI solution, components of a data center cooling system will collaborate intelligently and operate efficiently, optimizing the entire system’s power efficiency.

Source: Huawei

Chinese energy company Three Gorges Group (CTG) has completed the first phase of its Dongyuemiao Data Center project in Yichang, Hubei.

The data center is located on the right bank of the Three Gorges Dam — one of the world’s largest hydropower stations. Once all three phases of the project are completed, the data center will house 26,400 racks, spanning over 100,000 square meters — becoming the largest green data center cluster in central China.

The facility was built in partnership with Huawei Digital Power. The company provided 160 modular equipment rooms, 38 PowerPODs, 320 SmartLi battery energy storage devices, 160 high-temperature fan walls, one iCooling@AI cooling system, and one ‘AI-Robot’ for inspection uses.

The entire power consumption of this first phase, amounting to over 200 million kWh electricity per year, will be supplied using clean hydropower generated by the Three Gorges Dam. The project is naturally cooled by water from the river to significantly reduce energy consumption and boost energy efficiency.

The Dongyuemiao Data Center is built in accordance with the national class-A equipment room standards. It utilizes industry-leading technologies along with proprietary, secure, and controllable products, to become the first large-scale, green, zero-carbon data center in China.

The Dongyuemiao Data Center is a key digital transformation project for the Three Gorges Group and part of its 14th Five-Year Plan, which prioritizes green, digital development.

Source: PRNewswire

In our pursuit towards sustainability, GreenBay was recently awarded the highest Diamond tier of the GCI Certified Green Computing Vendor (CGCV).

The Green Computing Initiative (GCI) has been the leading green computing accreditation and certification organization that certifies and endorses organizations and professionals in Green Computing technologies since 2008. GCI certification is the standard of excellence that the industry seeks in order to ensure efficient and effective sustainable computing practices.

In our pursuit towards sustainability, GreenBay was recently awarded the highest Diamond tier of the GCI Certified Green Computing Vendor (CGCV).

The Green Computing Initiative (GCI) has been the leading green computing accreditation and certification organization that certifies and endorses organizations and professionals in Green Computing technologies since 2008. GCI certification is the standard of excellence that the industry seeks in order to ensure efficient and effective sustainable computing practices.

The CGCV certification
As an implementiation vendor for green data centers, this certification verifies GreenBay conforms to the prescribed standards and quality of work. There are 5 certification tiers namely Diamond, Pearl, Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald. Diamond is the highest tier whilst Emerald is the lowest tier.

Why is it important to engage a GCI Certified Green Computing Vendor (CGCV)?
High demand for data storage management, growing energy cost, and massive electricity consumption have been the catalysts for the increasing demand of green data centers. A green data center offers identical features and abilities of a traditional data center but uses a lower amount of energy and space. Therefore, green data centers are regarded as eco-friendlier and a must for organisations who prioritise sustainability.

GCI provides the industry’s benchmark in recognizing and rewarding best practice in facility energy efficiency and carbon footprint management. GCI’s Certified Green Computing Facility (CGCF) certification provides verifiable evidence that an organization is not only claiming it follows green computing facility best practices but that it has ACTUALLY implemented them.

By engaging a GCI Certified Green Computing Vendor (CGCV), you are assured of a best in its class green data center which maximises energy efficiency.

In addition, engaging a Certified Implementation Vendor, such as GreenBay, ensures that every aspect of a data center project can successfully ace intensive auditing by GCI to obtain it’s green data center facility certification.

A CGCF certified data center stands to enjoy major cost savings through energy efficiency and is prepared for eventual carbon legislation. It is also an acknowledgement of an organizations’s environmental sustainability efforts.

Xi’an, located in Northwest China, is one of the most historical cities in the world, serving as the capital for much of ancient China. Home to the famous Terracotta Army, the city receives hundred of millions of tourists every year.

Droves of tourists bring massive torrents of data. According to third-party database company Statista, 2021 saw a 79 Zettabyte (ZB) increase in data volume, the equivalent of approximately 79 billion Terabytes (TB). Such dramatic increases in data volumes put heavy strains on operators, and those in Xi’an are no exception to this trend.

In order to deal with an influx in mobile data, China Mobile set an ambitious goal to build its new and green Xixian Data Center (Shaanxi) in Xi’an. In collaboration with long-term partner Huawei, they decided on a solution that involved combining a prefabricated modular data center with indirect evaporative cooling technology to achieve a quick service rollout while prioritizing green and low-carbon results.

The data center was divided into 232 modules with the equipment all prefabricated and preinstalled in the factory. Then, after completing onsite preparation, LEGO-like construction was performed. This allowed engineers to complete the entire service rollout in just six months, with construction waste and dust slashed by 80%, and a material recovery rate exceeding 80%.

Huawei’s indirect evaporative cooling technology, however, capitalizes on Xi’an’s climate, drawing air from the surroundings to cool the facilities. Powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, the air compressor is only needed for two months of the year, with the facility relying on natural cooling for the other 10 months, reducing the cooling system’s energy consumption by more than 50%. As such, over a 10-year cycle, nearly 60 million kWh of electricity is saved, alongside 400,000 tonnes of water, which translates into slashing carbon emissions by 27,000 tonnes, the equivalent of planting 37,000 trees.

Huawei recently delivered a prefabricated modular data center for Safaricom as the telco begins to ramp up operations and launch a mobile network service in Ethiopia.

Source: PRNewswire