2) Infrastructure: What is divided for a long time must eventually unite.
In recent years, converged infrastructure has become a new trend in data centers. Simply put, converged infrastructure integrates resources such as servers, storage, networking, and management software into a unified solution. Compared to traditional data center architectures, converged infrastructure breaks down the boundaries between storage, computing, and networking, simplifying the deployment, operation, and management of IT infrastructure. This shortens deployment time for users, improves resource utilization, and significantly reduces procurement costs for enterprises.
3) Green and energy-saving is an inevitable trend.
Rising energy costs and ever-increasing computing demands have brought data center energy consumption to the forefront of public attention. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s “Guiding Opinions on the Construction and Layout of Data Centers” emphasizes the promotion of green data centers and green power supplies, explicitly requiring that newly built large-scale cloud computing data centers achieve a power efficiency (PUE) value of below 1.5, and that existing data centers, through integration, renovation, and upgrades, should reduce their PUE value to below 2.0. On February 1, 2014, Shanghai took the lead in issuing the first mandatory local standard in China for data center energy consumption limits, officially sounding the clarion call for energy conservation in the data center field.
Abroad, companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Google have actively carried out “green” transformation of their data centers and launched many ultra-low PUE data centers. These successful cases provide useful lessons for the construction of green data centers in China.
Current status of data center power supply and distribution system
1) Traditional UPS technology lags far behind the development of data centers.
The trend of “silicon advancing while copper retreats” has become a major development trend in the power electronics field. After the replacement of power devices such as MOSFETs and IGBTs, the widespread application of DSPs and digital circuits, and the gradual maturation of new topologies such as LLC, soft switching, and three-level inverters, high frequency, digitalization, and intelligence have become the mainstream trends in electronic products. Traditional analog circuit devices such as transformers and filter inductors, represented by “copper,” are gradually being replaced by digital circuit devices such as microcontrollers, control chips, and new semiconductor power devices, represented by “silicon.” It is the extensive application of “silicon” that has led to increasingly smaller, more efficient, and faster electronic products, a trend particularly evident in the IT field, such as blade servers and atomic routers. In the consumer electronics field, this is reflected in increasingly thinner mobile phones and smaller set-top boxes. For the UPS industry, “copper” represents the isolation transformer of traditional industrial frequency UPS, while “silicon” represents more intelligent high-frequency UPS. The extensive use of “silicon” has made UPS more intelligent, as software requirements are increasing, and UPS has transformed from a traditional hardware product into a product combining hardware and software. Meanwhile, from an environmental perspective, copper is a non-renewable resource, while silicon mainly comes from sand and has huge reserves. Therefore, whether from a technical or economic cost perspective, “silicon in, copper out” will inevitably be an important trend in the development of UPS systems.