The need to build low-carbon, energy-saving data centres in the Middle East

Accelerated transformation of the energy infrastructure, as the world digitalises, is inevitable, driving big changes for energy enterprises and the sector as a whole.

Energy conservation and emissions reductions — under the threat of irreversible climate change — are pressing global concerns. With all industries actively engaged in implementing carbon neutrality goals, building greener and far more energy efficient data centres is a major target for the tech industry. This is an area that Huawei has already explored and made significant breakthroughs in.

Huawei FusionDC — a next generation, green data centre solution — promises the wholesale reconstruction of data centres, from overall architecture and management to temperature control and power supply systems. And the results? A substantial improvement in power usage effectiveness (PUE), building truly low carbon and energy saving data centres.

A greener way to build

Huawei’s FusionDC has a modular design, with all the core subsystems prefabricated in the factory. This means that modules simply have to be assembled onsite, block by block, making construction faster and easier.

With this solution, a high-level data centre with 1,000 cabinets can be delivered within just six months, supporting rapid service rollout. Plus, building a prefabricated modular data centre involves dramatically reduced waste, while the assembly rate (the proportion of equipment that is prefabricated) reaches 97 per cent. In the case of a five-story building area of 8600 sqm and 1,500 cabinets with power density of 8KW per cabinet, construction waste is slashed by 80 per cent. Carbon emissions related to construction are also reduced by 90 per cent. This truly is a greener way to build data centre facilities.

Achieving optimal energy efficiency

A data centre’s cooling system is its biggest consumer of energy. Traditional chilled water solutions have unacceptably high energy needs, not to mention frustratingly complex architectures.

Huawei FusionDC uses indirect evaporative cooling to maximise natural sources of cooling, effectively improving PUE. In addition, Huawei applies artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in data centre operations, cloud-edge collaboration, cloud model training, and local high-performance policy execution.

In a particular 1,500 cabinet data centre currently in operation in Beijing, with power density of 8KW per cabinet and a load rate of 50 per cent, Huawei’s indirect evaporative cooling solution has cut electricity consumption by 32 per cent and water consumption by 33 per cent compared to a chilled water solution. The power supply system uses full-chain converged power modules and Huawei SmartLi intelligent lithium batteries to deliver high efficiency and power density. With distributed components and a converged power supply, the physical space required for the power distribution system is cut by 40 per cent, with system efficiency reaching up to 97.5 per cent, compared to a traditional solution.

Converged intelligent features enable end-to-end (E2E) predictive maintenance and E2E optimisation of resource utilisation as well as energy efficiency and operations and maintenance (O&M). This is a full-lifecycle experience and, in energy operations, an autonomous driving data centre.

Energy conservation and sustainable development are now key drivers of the data centre industry’s development. Huawei FusionDC provides a green data centre solution, one that has already been widely adopted around the world.

In the future, Huawei will continue to innovate and help enterprises achieve carbon neutrality by building more energy efficient, low carbon data centres that foster business success – but not at the cost of the planet.

Sanjay Kumar Sainani is the SVP and CTO of Huawei’s Global Data Centre Facility Business