Uinnova, Huawei and China Unicom (Joint project), NTT Com, Shanghai Data Solutions (SDS), China Mobile and Huawei (Joint project), China Unicom-Tencent Operation Team collected the prizes at the second DatacenterDynamics (DCD) Greater China Awards, which were announced at a gala awards dinner in Beijing on December 12.

The DatacenterDynamics Awards recognize innovation, leadership and ‘out of the box’ thinking in the data center industry around the world. Since launching in 2007 in London, the Awards have expanded globally and are widely regarded as the ‘Oscars’ in the data center industry.

The Awards were presented after strict selection and evaluation by more than 20 data center experts, led by Zhong Jinghua, the deputy chief engineer of CEEDI, and Stephen Worn, the CTO of DatacenterDynamics.

The full list of winners of the second Greater China Awards are as below:

Category: Future Thinking & Design Concepts
Sponsored by SDS IDX

Winner: Visualized Management of Data Center by Uinnova
This is an innovative concept for data center management put forward by Uinnova, a start-up company specialized in providing 3D information visualization capability for IT infrastructure management.

By using the latest visualized technologies like 3D virtual simulation, the new solution can achieve visualized end-to-end management from the software and hardware level to the upper application level, thus solving difficult management problems caused by massive data center equipment of various kinds, and disorderly information generated by various management tools.

“It is the first visualized tool that achieves end-to-end management of data centers by making use of the 3D simulation technology, thus creating a new branch for data center management. By integrating with many management tools including DCIM within a data center and based on a wide variety of data it collects from such management tools, the system can generate vivid 3D images that is in line with people’s cognitive characteristics, achieving overall visualized management of the data center, from the physical level to the logical level, from the lower infrastructure level to upper application architecture, from the static configuration information to the dynamic performance alert. This can avoid making an overall judgment on the basis of one-sided viewpoint, a limitation that may be caused by the isolated management of multiple management tools, thus making complicated data center easier to see, to understand and to manage,” said Chen Ao’han, General Manager of Uinnova.

This solution has already been deployed in data centers of China Unicom, PetroChina, many Chinese banks, communication companies and government bodies.

Category: Innovation in the Medium-Data Center
Sponsored by DatacenterDynamics Focus

Winner: Huawei-China Unicom Beijing Huangcun IDC Project
As a joint project between Huawei and China Unicom, this Internet Data Center (IDC) adopts innovative modular warehouse IDC solution. The design, procurement bidding, and customer acceptance test at the factory, batch manufacturing and commissioning of the project is completed within three months.

The project combines the respective advantages of traditional data centers and containerized data centers. On the one hand, it gives full play to the sun-proof, thief-proof and water-proof functions of the warehouse; on the other hand, by adopting the prefabricated container-like design, it can achieve rapid deployment as containerized data centers, yet the construction cost is lower than conventional containerized data centers.

Zhang Shoujie, General Manager of Data Center Integration Solution Field of Huawei, said: “Warehouse data centers can help to revitalize old warehouse assets and reduce the construction cost of new builds. It will emerge as an important development trend for building data centers in the future. It is estimated that warehouse data centers will take 50% share from traditional data centers hosted in buildings (currently 80%) and account for 30~40% of the whole market in the next few years,.”

Category: Innovation in the Mega-Data Center
Sponsored by DCD Intelligence

Winner: NTT Communications Hong Kong Financial Data Centre (FDC^TM)
NTT Communications Hong Kong Financial Data Centre (FDC^TM) has 70,000 sq m gross floor area with two data center towers and one command and control tower, and can provide over 6,000 racks upon full completion, with a capability of providing 100MVA utility power and 15,000 tons of cooling capacity. The first phase of FDC™ opened in 2013, and the second phase is scheduled to be completed in 2015.

This Tier IV data center adopts modular design for hybrid Tiering, the first ever deployed in Hong Kong. This design allows customers to choose redundancy levels in accordance with their business requirements.

By lo-locating the cable landing station of the Asia Submarine-cable Express (ASE) and the network node of NTT Communications’ global network, the FDC is able to provide ultra-low latency network solution, which enables customers to win a competitive advantage in an environment where every millisecond counts.

This data center is also close to the data center of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited, enabling customers to gain proximity advantage for financial service institutions.

This data center made many innovations for achieving high energy efficiency and sustainable development. For instance, it adopts fuel cell UPS that uses hydrogen as a green alternative to conventional fuel and batteries, utilizes solar energy to heat water for reducing overall power consumption, and uses the hot aisle and cold aisle containment design.

Category: Innovations in Outsourcing
Sponsored by DatacenterDynamics Converged

Winner: SDS’ IDX E-commerce Service Project
This is a project implemented by Shanghai Data Solution (SDS) for Baozun, an e-commerce service provider for high-end brands.

Within one month, SDS’s data center, network and the operation and maintenance team passed the strict inspection by security consultants of high-end brands like Nike and Microsoft. Within 2 months, SDS completed data center migration for 8 customers of Baozun, implemented 32 specific projects and achieved 24-hour continuous monitoring, and coordinated the efforts of various departments including sales, production development, technical, and operation and maintenance for providing individualized solutions for Baozun.

In this project, what Baozun needs is not only the basic server hosting service, but also comprehensive outsourcing services including network, equipment management and cloud services. Moreover, Baozun has higher requirements in terms of quality, flexibility and service mechanism.

To address the high requirements of Baozun, SDS established an E-commerce Working Group to provide the scalable platform and individualized services, in line with the floating IT requirements of e-commerce customers.

“Since it is launched this July, our e-commerce solution has passed the strict scrutiny of many high-end brands and has been running very well,” said Yao Gang, Vice President of SDS.

IDX e-commerce service project is SDS’ first successful trial in the e-commerce area. Prior to this new initiative, SDS focused on providing high-end services for financial institutions and Fortune 500 enterprises.

In the e-commerce colocation area, SDS is the first company to set up SDS E-commerce and Cloud Computing Center in the Greater China Region. Apart from establishing an e-commerce team that provides 7*24*365 operation and maintenance services, it has rolled out “intelligent bandwidth” service for e-commerce customers.

As an important data center service provider in Shanghai, SDS boasts data center revenue that is second only to the Shanghai Subsidiary of China Telecom in the Shanghai Area. It has also entered into partnership with Telehouse, a subsidiary of KDDI to jointly build a data center in Yizhuang of Beijing.

Category: The ‘Green’ Data Center
Sponsored by Green Grid

Winner: Heilongjiang Subsidiary of China Mobile-Huawei Modular Warehouse IDC Project
Heilongjiang Subsidiary of China Mobile-Huawei Modular Warehouse IDC Project represents the best practice of China Mobile in building green data centers.

Using a modular design, this data center tried various ways for enhancing energy efficiency, including using direct current (DC) without UPS, adopting hot and cold aisle containment design, enhancing inlet air temperature, and using heat recovery wheel technology for getting indirect free cooling capacity most of the time during the year, complemented by compressor cooling when the outdoor temperature becomes high. According to the monitoring data collected for more than half a year, this data center can achieve a PUE lower than 1.22 when running at full workload.

Sources from the Planning Department of Heilongjiang Subsidiary of China Mobile said: “China Mobile has always been committed to data center innovation, and using direct current for data center power supply is a tradition followed by the company for long. This data center mainly uses -48V DC, and will deploy customized servers later for reducing the power conversion times, and thus lowering power supply cost.

Category: Data Center “Special Assignment” Team of the Year
Sponsored by DCProfessional Development

Winner: China Unicom-Tencent Professional, Efficient and Cooperative Operation Team
China Unicom, one of China’s largest telecommunication players, and Tencent, one of China’s largest internet companies, by overcoming differences in company culture and operation models, have very close cooperation in planning, designing, constructing, commissioning, operating and maintaining China Unicom’s Shanghai Zhoupu IDC data center.

This is a data center project customized designed in accordance with Tencent’s business requirements. It has a floor space of 12,000sqm, with a capacity of hosting 1500 racks and 30,000 servers.

By establishing a joint operation and maintenance team, the two parties give full play to their respective advantages, including Tencent’s Internet Team’s strength in developing and applying energy-saving technologies, and China Unicom’s Operation and Maintenance Team’s strength in standardized on-site IDC management and safe operations, for ensuring the reliable operation of the data center and better customer experience with lower cost.

By using the modular design, the data center was brought online within 8 months. It has a competitive advantage in energy efficiency with a PUE lower than 1.6. It is the first large IDC data center that adopts the high voltage direct current (HVDC) + utility power design on a large scale in China, and it is also China Unicom’s first data center that combines water-based and air-based air conditioner systems, as well as cold aisle technologies on a large scale.