③ Application of Internet of Things (IoT) technology
With the further popularization of mobile communication technology, the era of the Internet of Things has arrived. Network management apps, mobile operations and maintenance, and automated maintenance will gradually replace traditional operation and maintenance methods. Imagine a data center located near a solar power station in Inner Mongolia, with no one in the server room. Thousands of miles away in Beijing, an IT maintenance worker from a company checks their mobile phone and finds an alarm from the network management system: “UPS #12 load has exceeded expectations.” After automatic tracking, the system finds that the power consumption of several servers has increased significantly, due to a surge in the number of users of a game running on the servers. The system then offers two options: “1. Activate the backup power supply module (increases system electricity costs by 65 yuan/day)” and “2. Migrate some applications to idle server #453 (increases system electricity costs by 32 yuan/day).” The network management system then automatically activates the power supply module or server according to the selection. In addition to the daily management of data centers, the application of IoT technology will also bring about a revolution in equipment maintenance methods, such as equipment life prediction, fault prevention, and fault handling. Users can purchase the corresponding maintenance products according to the prompts of the network management system, just like shopping on Taobao, and remotely authorize the manufacturer’s maintenance personnel to go to the fault location for maintenance. The single-board-level spatial positioning system can guide the maintenance personnel to quickly replace the faulty components.
As equipment becomes increasingly intelligent, the accompanying information security issues cannot be ignored. Traditional users often believe that viruses and hackers are unfortunate events unique to the internet, and that “purely hardware-based” power supply and distribution systems are not a major concern. However, with the widespread adoption of mobile internet and intelligent technologies, infrastructure will inevitably be incorporated into network management systems, thus facing various cybersecurity risks. For example, the recently exposed OpenSSL “Heartbleed” vulnerability indicates that some UPS network management systems may be at risk of leaking user account passwords. Even if hackers cannot shut down the UPS through the network management system (some small-capacity UPS systems do have the function of remotely shutting down servers), simply changing some key parameters could still have a serious impact on the entire power supply system.
This demonstrates that high-efficiency, intelligent modular UPS systems are clearly more in line with the future requirements of data center development. It is understood that the current annual market growth rate for modular UPS systems exceeds 6%, and is expected to exceed 10% in the future. In the recently concluded China Mobile centralized procurement, modular UPS systems, as an independent bid, have already accounted for over 14% of the procurement share for capacities of 120kVA and above. In the telecommunications industry, high-frequency and modular designs have become the mainstream trends in UPS procurement.