New infrastructure defines the new connotation of data center

At this year's National People's Congress, the new infrastructure was written into the government work report for the first time, and it has received great attention from all walks of life. Recently, the "Analysis Report on Network Performance of Data Centers in Typical Regions of my country (2020)" was officially released, once again focusing the industry's attention on the data center field. So, what is the current status of data center development in my country, what new technologies are being implemented, and what will be the future trend? With these hot issues, the reporter of "People's Post and Telecommunications" interviewed Zeng Jianqiu, professor of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Shang Yanqiang, general manager of Youfu Network North China, and Guo Liang, deputy chief engineer of the Cloud Computing and Big Data Research Institute of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.

Data center is given new meaning

"After being incorporated into the new infrastructure, data centers have been given new connotations. In the future, they will need to serve our work and life more universally." Zeng Jianqiu believes that the development of new infrastructure requires the support of new data centers. Facing the needs of the digital economy era, data centers under the new infrastructure must fully meet the development needs of technologies and applications such as cloud computing and big data, and support the digital transformation of all walks of life.

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Data centers are the cornerstone of new infrastructure. "5G leads the new infrastructure, and the development of 5G is inseparable from data centers." Zeng Jianqiu believes that the development of 5G is the result of data-driven. As the network becomes more popular and applications continue to flourish, the amount of data generated by the entire society is increasing day by day. People usually compare data to "cars" and the network that carries data to "roads." "In the future, as there are more and more 'cars', the 'roads' need to be wide enough," he emphasized.

This year's government work report explicitly calls for "expanding 5G applications." In this regard, Zeng Jianqiu believes that the implementation of 5G applications requires strong support from data centers. Building high-quality data centers is a necessary condition for the development of 5G, and building high-quality 5G networks is the key foundation and primary task of new infrastructure. "Data centers play an extremely important cornerstone role in new infrastructure. It can even be said that if data centers cannot develop, 5G cannot develop."

Data center development shifts gears and accelerates

In the past few years, my country's data center industry has achieved vigorous development, and the acceleration of new infrastructure has injected strong impetus into a new round of take-off for the data center industry. Zeng Jianqiu summarized the development status of my country's data center industry in three sentences: First, the scale has grown steadily, but regional development is still unbalanced; second, the regional distribution is reasonable, but "the east is thick and the west is thin"; third, the utilization rate has increased, but it is still difficult to meet dynamic needs.

"The overall level of my country's data center network is on par with the international level." Shang Yanqiang said that in order to truly reflect the development of my country's data center network, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and Youfu Network conducted a three-month network test and wrote the "Analysis Report on Data Center Network Performance in Typical Regions of my country (2020)" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report"). The "Report" shows that driven by massive demands such as e-commerce and online meetings, the level of my country's data center network is constantly improving. At present, technologies such as 25G and 400G have been commercially used on a large scale in my country's data center networks, and white box switches and open source operating systems are also being continuously developed and initially commercialized, which is basically the same as the progress abroad.

At the same time, my country's data center industry is actively cooperating with international standards organizations. Guo Liang revealed that my country's data center industry is deepening its related work. For example, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology has established an intelligent lossless network project in IEEE 802.1 NENDICA with Tencent, Baidu, Meituan, JD.com, Huawei and other parties. It is expected that the practical results will be released to the public in the form of a white paper by the end of this year.

Towards high-quality development

Where will data centers go under the wave of new infrastructure? Zeng Jianqiu believes that the industry should clearly understand that data centers have become the backbone of the digital world. New-generation information and communication technologies such as cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence have become catalysts driving changes in data centers. Considering the broader application needs in the future, the industry should promote the formulation of data protection laws.

"my country's data center industry is expected to continue to maintain a high growth rate of about 30%." Shang Yanqiang made this judgment, and he is full of confidence in the growth rate of my country's data center industry. He believes that network programmable chips, lossless networks, SDN, SD-WAN and Internet backbone direct connection points are all hot trends in the development of data center network technology. As the scale of data centers grows and more and more upper-layer applications are carried, the direct connection network of data centers will also become the focus of industry attention. From the perspective of promotion steps, in the future, the direct connection of data center networks between regions must be realized first, followed by direct connection between different data centers.

"The balanced development of data centers needs to receive more attention." Guo Liang said that the report shows that the eastern region is still a hot spot for data center investment, and first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen account for a high share of my country's data center market. In the future, in the face of the needs of new infrastructure, all parties in the industry need to consider the construction needs of small and medium-sized data centers in the central and western regions on the basis of deploying large-scale cloud computing data centers. Only in this way can we further improve our level of informatization and digitalization, eliminate the digital divide, and promote the development of my country's digital economy.