What is the data center built in?

DT era

The development of the Internet has directly brought humanity into the information age. Massive data has changed all aspects of traditional business, scientific research, and daily life. With the rise of the Internet, especially the mobile Internet, the data center has become a very popular concept. Regardless of the communications industry, financial industry, IT industry, and government departments, the four words data center are everywhere. Ma Yun has always said that our world will soon enter the DT era from the IT era. This DT era actually refers to the world of data. DT is data processing technology, and to enter the era of DT, it is inseparable from the popular data center.

Human activities produce data all the time, your activity trajectory is data, your body changes are data, and your words are data ...

In this DT era, your every move can be quantified with data. In the past, these data related to you are all past tense, but in the DT era, your data can be saved to the data center in real time. For example, the transaction information generated by your daily payment and consumption using mobile phones can be stored in the data center in real time.

Over the whole year, these transaction information have formed huge data. By statistics of these data, you can analyze your consumption habits, consumption time, consumption category, and accurately portray your portrait. The premise of this statistical analysis is to establish a data center that stores your personal data.

But for many ordinary people, the data center is still a slightly abstract and somewhat mysterious existence. For security reasons, most data centers are not open to the public, and most have not seen the data center in the field. In addition, the location of data centers that are now seen in the media are more special, which adds a layer of mystery to the data center. For example, the famous Tencent company built its important data center in a cave in Guizhou. The cave was also dubbed the "Cave Goose Factory" by netizens.

Not only that, the international giant Huawei has almost hollowed out a hill in Guizhou for its own data center construction. In addition, in the prairie of Inner Mongolia, major operators and well-known IT manufacturers have also built a large number of data centers. In foreign countries, like Microsoft built the data center directly under the sea, Facebook built the data center in the Arctic Circle. Iceland, an extremely cold country with a population of less than 400,000, is rated as an ideal choice for establishing a data center. So what exactly is a data center, and why are some of them in caves, some of them located on the prairie, and some of them built in the Arctic Circle?

Data center location

From the perspective of location selection, data center location selection has gone through three stages in the past two decades.

In the first stage, the location is in the city center. In the early years, the term data center did not exist. At that time, the major units undertaking the function of data center were generally called computing centers or information centers. The size of the computer room was not large, and almost all were below 500 square meters.

At this time, the computer room is generally located in major office buildings in the city center, such as banks, insurance, electricity, government agencies, etc., and its computer room and office building are integrated. Even today, there are still a large number of miniature data centers in office buildings in the streets.

In the second stage, the site selection is in the suburbs. With the development of the Internet, the amount of data began to blow out, and the traditional computer room could no longer meet the needs. At this time, the location of the computer room began to appear suburban, and data centers with thousands of square meters began to appear. These thousands of square meters of data centers can only be settled in the suburbs.

Many large institutions, such as banks and insurance companies, are beginning to show a trend toward data centralization across the country. Operators are the originator of the construction of such data centers. In the early days, the communication hub computer rooms of major operators gradually evolved into full-service computer rooms, which not only assumed the core role of voice communication data transfer, but also assumed user data and billing data within their jurisdictions. , Business data and Internet data processing, the area of ​​this type of computer room is generally between 5,000 square meters and 10,000 square meters.

Later, with the development of the Internet business, the demand for hosting business appeared in large numbers. The so-called hosting refers to some Internet companies renting the operator's computer room, storing their equipment in the operator's computer room, the operator provides the corresponding computer room infrastructure and network access, and various IDC computer rooms begin to emerge.

With the continuous growth of Internet companies, the managed devices are showing a blowout trend. In consideration of cost and data security, some large Internet operators began to prepare their own data centers. For example, Tencent's first-generation data center started around 2006. The characteristic of this type of data center is that it directly leases the operator's transmission link, and divides some areas inside the data center as the operator's transmission equipment room, and directly accesses the operator's network. For example, a data center where the author has worked is located outside Shanghai. The area has centralized data centers at the headquarters level of major banks. Each bank covers an area of ​​more than 100 acres. Such a large site is almost unrealistic in the city center.

In the third stage, remote location selection. Data centers have begun a large number of remote constructions in different places. From the geographical point of view, they are gradually away from first- and second-tier cities. Tens of thousands or even tens of thousands of square meters of data centers began to appear in large numbers, and the power consumption of data centers is increasing. The cooling system of the data center is a large power consumer of the data center. In order to save energy and save costs, the major Internet giants have begun to build large-scale data centers in areas with low temperatures, good heat dissipation conditions, and low electricity costs.

In the third phase, there are two popular areas for data center construction, one is Inner Mongolia and the other is Guizhou. In fact, before Guizhou, Inner Mongolia has become the most popular for Internet companies. The construction of IDC has started intensively in Hohhot, Ordos, Ulan Qab and other places in Inner Mongolia.

With the construction and development of the data center in the third stage, it has further promoted the construction of a national Internet backbone direct connection point. As a national important communication hub, the national-level Internet backbone direct connection point is mainly used to aggregate and dredge communication traffic between regions and even the whole country, and is the top key link of the Internet interconnection architecture in China.

In the early days, there were only three national backbone direct connection points in the country. On December 30, 2013, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced the establishment of seven new backbone direct connection points in Chengdu, Wuhan, Xi'an, Shenyang, Nanjing, Chongqing and Zhengzhou, in addition to the three backbone direct connection points in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Increase the number of national direct connection points to 10. As of September 2014, all 10 backbone direct connection points in the country have been put into use.

In November 2016, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology organized an expert review meeting to review the application for the establishment of national-level Internet backbone direct connection points in Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guizhou. After the meeting, the approval was successively approved to add Hangzhou national-level Internet backbone direct connection points, Guiyang Guian national-level Internet backbone direct connection points, and Fuzhou national-level Internet backbone direct connection points. This increased the number of national direct connection points to 13.

If the area where the data center is located does not have directly connected nodes at the national level, then the external service of the data center actually needs to go through the superior nodes in Beijing, Xi'an and other places. So what are the benefits of a national network direct connection point? The Fuzhou National Internet backbone node was introduced as follows: In 2017, the Fuzhou National Internet backbone direct connection was the first to adopt 100G board interconnection in the country, with two-way 800G interconnection capability, and the construction of 10 new direct bandwidth Joint first.

According to the data released by Fujian Province, after the construction of Fuzhou backbone nodes is completed, the average delay between the Internet in Fujian Province has been reduced from about 50 ms to about 10 ms, a drop of 80%, and the packet loss rate has dropped to close to 0% ; The average delay between outbound Internet networks has dropped from about 100 ms to about 40 ms, a drop of more than 60%; the packet loss rate has dropped from about 1% to about 0.3%, a drop of 70%.

National-level Internet backbone nodes mean faster and more stable access to services, and these are essential for large data centers. In the backbone node cities, a large number of data centers are often gathered, which has the inherent advantage of developing the data industry.