In 1972, during Nixon’s visit to China, a UPS was reportedly among the gifts transported by his presidential plane, marking the first appearance of a UPS in China. More than forty years later, the global UPS market has reached $7 billion, with the Chinese market exceeding 4 billion RMB. In recent years, the booming development of the internet industry and the large-scale construction of data centers have further increased the market demand for UPS. However, can today’s UPS truly adapt to the development of data centers, especially the future development of cloud data centers? Will power distribution equipment still look the same ten years from now? Will UPS eventually disappear? This is not unfounded worry. Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), born alongside computer technology, are increasingly unable to keep up with the development of the IT industry. Under the impact of various new technologies accompanying big data, the traditional UPS industry is facing a crisis.
In recent years, the development of data centers has gradually shown the following trends. Due to space limitations, this article will not go into the specific implementation and technical details, but will only analyze the various trends related to infrastructure, especially power supply and distribution systems.
1) Virtualization simplifies complexity
In recent years, with the rise of cloud computing, virtualization technology has gradually matured. Server virtualization technology refers to the use of virtualization techniques to fully utilize the hardware performance of servers, ensuring that while enterprises invest in costs, they can improve operational efficiency, save energy, reduce economic costs, and reduce space waste. For example, four servers that were originally at 20% utilization can, through virtualization resource consolidation, concentrate business on a single server at 80% utilization, thereby improving resource utilization.
The latest Foresight survey report shows that improving business continuity and enabling disaster recovery are among the top motivations for consumers to adopt virtualization, and virtualization file and data backup, recovery, snapshot, copy, and archiving technologies already have a relatively well-established market.