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The following content is from an older version of this website, and may not display correctly.The US government wants data center providers to enter the Chinese market - and the Department of Energy (DoE) plans to help them do so by exporting energy efficient practices.
China’s data data center market is booming, and has a big requirement for energy efficient data centers, but currently their energy efficiency is not very good. The DoE has called in efficiency expert Dale Sartor of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) to educate US businesses in the needs of Chinese data centers, and to help promote the export of efficient practices including the shared designs of the Open Compute Project. All this will be described in a webinar due to take place on 19 May.
Help China run better
Over the past three years, data center space in China has grown at around 20 percent, according to DCD Intelligence. In 2014, space grew at 19.3 percent over the previous year, and investment was up by 28.2 percent. This means China now containes 5 percent of the world’s data center space and around 6 percent of its investment.
Despite this growth, China’s data centers are not being run very efficiently. They have an average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 2.2 to 3.0. This is higher than the figure for mature markets such as the USA and Europe - even though new data centers tend to be more efficient.
The DoE thinks that this could be a potentiual goldmine for vendors of energy efficient solutions from more advanced markets.
DOE is also working with China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and industry to promote open standards, test procedures, specifications, and evaluation metrics for US and Chinese data centers. The Lawrence Berkley labs will also be working to extend the concepts of the Open Compute Project (OCP) to China.
All this will be detailed in a webinar on 19 May, featuring Sartor, along with speakers from the Power Standards Lab and HP.