According to reports, Wu Hequan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, was interviewed by People's Post and Telegraph recently.
1 Data volume continues to grow, computing power is everywhere
Informatization penetrates into all aspects of production and life, and the amount of data continues to grow. According to the IDC report, the total amount of global data is about 53ZB in 2020 and is expected to reach 175ZB in 2025.
"Data has risen to the country's strategic resources, and the role of data as a production factor is increasingly recognized. This role is reflected through the mining of data value." Wu Hequan said that data, computing power and algorithms are the three major aspects of data mining. Pillar, where computing power refers to computing power or data processing power, represents computing speed, computing methods, communication capabilities, storage capabilities, cloud computing service capabilities, etc. It is a platform for carrying data and algorithm operations. In addition to the centralized large-scale computing power center, the deep integration of communication and computing makes communication terminals, the Internet of Things, edge computing, industrial modules, mobile communication base stations, and communication network equipment and other network elements also embed computing capabilities to varying degrees. It can be said that computing power everywhere.
2 Accumulating data resources, improving computing power, and expanding the computing power industry has become a national strategic choice
Wu Hequan emphasized that computing power is an important part of information infrastructure, computing power services have become a new point of business applications in the new era, computing power has become a new driving force supporting the continuous and in-depth development of the digital economy, and empowering the digital transformation and upgrading of all walks of life. "Accumulating data resources, improving computing power, and expanding the computing power industry have become the strategic choices of major countries in the world."
3 Five challenges for data center development
(1) my country's current data centers are still in a small and scattered extensive construction stage, and the proportion of large data centers is low
As of the end of 2020, the U.S. accounted for 40% of the ultra-large data centers operated by the world's 20 major cloud and Internet service companies, ranking first, China ranked second with 10%, and Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Australia together accounted for 19%. . IDC report shows that China's data volume will account for 18% of the world's data in 2020. Compared with this, my country's large-scale data center accounted for 10% of the world's proportion is relatively low. Another set of data shows that the number of data centers in my country in 2019 is about 74,000, accounting for about 23% of the total number of data centers in the world, but the number of ultra-large and large data centers accounted for only 12.7%. Some large enterprises, especially large state-owned enterprises, usually tend to own data centers instead of using data centers or other third-party services of telecom operators. This is also one of the reasons for the slow development of large data centers.
(2) A large number of data centers are not clearly positioned
The power-on rate of the data center one year after its completion has not exceeded 40%, the data center interactive services across operating companies are lacking, a complete ecology has not been formed, the rack rental rate is sluggish, and the spillover effect to the whole society is not obvious. In many data centers, there is a shortage of operation and maintenance personnel, and the operation and maintenance capabilities cannot keep up with the speed of data center construction.
(3) "Eastern data and Western calculation" are facing challenges in coordination of computing power
Due to the differences in technological and economic development between regions, "counting east and west" is determined by our country's resource endowments and location advantages. From multiple data sources in the east to multiple computing centers in the west, it is necessary to interconnect through the network to realize the coordinated scheduling of computing power across regions and support the efficient circulation of data elements. The computing power network based on computing network collaboration is to activate computing power resources. The essential. Considering that in 2021, the proportion of global data center internal traffic will reach 71%, and data center interconnection and individual users will be 14% and 15% respectively. The balance and optimal scheduling of internal traffic in the data center will also be the focus of improving the efficiency of the data center.
(4) The core technology of the data center cannot be controlled independently
Hadoop, TensorFlow and Spark and other big data industry development of the underlying technology architecture is still controlled by the US technology giants, my country is still facing severe challenges in network security and information security technology.
(5) Data center faces the challenge of green and low-carbon development
The China Data Center Renewable Energy Application Development Report 2020 compiled by the Chinese Institute of Electronics shows that as of 2019, the electricity consumption of various data centers across the country accounted for 0.8% to 1% of the electricity consumption of the whole society. It is expected to reach 1.5% to 2% by 2030. The mounting density of equipment in data center cabinets continues to increase, which brings huge challenges to the heat management, power distribution, cable management, installation and migration of the cabinet.
4 Four major trends in the future development of data centers
my country has successively introduced a number of policies to speed up the construction of new infrastructure such as data centers. In May 2021, the "National Integrated Big Data Center Collaborative Innovation System Computing Hub Implementation Plan" was issued, clearly deploying the "Eastern Digital and Western Computing" project. In July, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the ``Three-Year Action Plan for the Development of New Data Centers (2021-2023)'', which clarified that it will take three years to form a new type of data with a reasonable layout, advanced technology, green and low-carbon, and a scale of computing power that is compatible with the growth of the digital economy. Central development pattern. As the country increases its strategic layout, what is the future development path and direction of the data center?
(1) Regionally, develop to the west
Although the demand for IDC in the eastern first-tier cities continues to be strong, land resources and power resources are even more in short supply. Beijing and Shanghai have issued policies that clearly restrict new IDC computer rooms. As of the end of 2018, the proportion of racks in use in the three data center clusters in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong has dropped to 31%, and the proportion of racks in use in data centers in the central and western regions has risen to nearly 39%. While the data center is developing to the west, it is still necessary to emphasize the co-construction and sharing of data centers at the national, regional, provincial and municipal levels in accordance with unified strategy, unified direction, unified planning, unified standards, etc., to avoid unrealistic blindness developing. In addition, the western region needs to train data center operation and maintenance personnel as soon as possible, improve network performance, reduce connection costs, and improve industry service levels.
(2) On storage, develop towards cloud data center
With the digital transformation of enterprises, enterprise-level data will exceed consumer data. According to the IDC report, the proportion of Chinese enterprise-level data in total data will increase from 49% in 2015 to 69% in 2025. Enterprises need to analyze the rapid growth of massive amounts of big data, and data storage will be migrated from local devices to cloud servers. Traditional data center traffic is expected to increase 1.1 times from 2016 to 2021, while cloud data center business traffic will increase 2.2 times to 18.9 ZB/year. It is estimated that cloud data center traffic will account for more than 90% of the total data center traffic in 2021. According to the "Cloud Computing Development White Paper (2019)" of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, from 2018 to 2022, the annual compound growth rate of China's public cloud market will reach 41.1%.
(3) Technically, promote the application of IPv6-based segmented routing (SRv6) technology in cloud-network convergence
SRv6 is used as the unified bearer platform protocol at the edge of the cloud network, while the software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) and the slice packet network (SPN) technology including flexible Ethernet (FlexE) are applied to simplify resource configuration and provide slices of business applications Isolation and intelligent adaptation, optimize cloud network and multi-cloud resource collaboration, and support efficient use of computing power.
(4) In operation, innovative data center service model
Data centers are asset-heavy. Large-scale data centers have high efficiency but large initial investment and a long return period. The data center should provide security protection (firewall protection, intrusion detection, etc.) and value-added services from the current hosting (machine positions, racks, cabinets, computer room rental) and management services (system configuration, data backup, troubleshooting services, etc.) (Load balancing, smart DNS, traffic monitoring, application hosting, on-demand customization) and other high value-added fields develop. The proportion of value-added services in the data center business has increased from 29% in 2010 to 53% in 2018. High-end value-added services will become the core competitiveness of data center service companies.
5 The positioning of telecom operators in the era of computing power
Telecom operators have a large number of computer rooms, backbone network broadband and international Internet export bandwidth, etc., and have the resource advantage to develop data center services. Their market size accounts for about two-thirds of my country's entire data center service market. Wu Hequan pointed out that data centers of telecom operators need to continue to improve in terms of market response speed and meeting customer customization needs.
"With the development of technology, business and market, telecom operators should think about their positioning in the era of computing power." Wu Hequan believes that, on the one hand, the commercial use of 5G accelerates the growth of mobile data, and the traditional traffic operations of telecom operators will be affected by traffic. The improvement of the network is further pipelined, and the incremental revenue does not increase; on the other hand, 5G promotes the development of the network to the cloud represented by SDN/NFV. The operating enterprise itself needs cloud capabilities, and at the same time, the cloud capabilities can be exported as services. This is adapting The need for digital transformation of enterprises and society. According to reports from Gartner and China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the global DC market will grow by about 10% from 2018 to 2020, while the growth rate of China's IDC market is expected to reach 30%. The combination of technology and market promotes computing power to become one of the general services of telecom operators.
Wu Hequan believes that compared with third-party data center companies, computing power networks can better demonstrate the advantages of telecom operators in the computing power era. The computing power network is the product of the deep integration of connection and computing.Operating companies use their network resources and operating experience to organically integrate the network and cloud computing capabilities. According to the type of application, it can provide low-latency dedicated line products and network slices, or Provides a large bandwidth channel that is not sensitive to delays, and can also select the corresponding WAN and the path to meet the cloud requirements based on the application information and the location of the cloud, or forward the data traffic to the local cloud or public based on the information security identification in the application information The cloud ensures that internal data does not leave the enterprise, and can also provide value-added services and security services on demand, realize users' nearby access and load balance of services, and improve business user experience.
"The computing power network has become one of the most critical features of the 2030 network. In the recent network architecture white paper released by the IMT-2030 Promotion Group, the computing power network technology has been regarded as one of the core technologies of 6G, including computing power service functions, computing power Routing function, calculation network arrangement management function, etc."
Wu Hequan said, "I am very pleased to see that China Mobile released the "Hashing Power Network White Paper" at the 2021 Partner Conference, proposing to build a computing power-centric, network-based, network cloud digital intelligent security side-end chain and other elements. The integrated three-dimensional ubiquitous computing network infrastructure promotes the network from cloud-network integration, computing-network integration, to computing-network symbiosis. At the same time, companies such as China Mobile have also taken the lead in proposing original technologies such as online computing and computing power-aware networks. Develop protocols and routing systems for computing and network integration."
Facing the future, Wu Hequan believes that the computing network era presents both opportunities and challenges for telecom operators. The transition from the current network to the new computing power network requires not only technological innovation, but also the realization of computing power operations, the establishment of computing power ecosystems, and the provision of computing power services. More exploration is needed in the management system and mechanism. This is not only the only way for telecom operators to transform, but also an upgraded version of the new generation of information infrastructure. It will lay a solid foundation for the digital, network and intelligent development of the whole society and open up the economy. The information "main artery" of social development. (The above is reproduced from the official website of the ups application)