IBM, GDS, Huawei, @hub and GCCA collected the prizes at the first DatacenterDynamics Greater China Awards, which were announced at a gala awards dinner in Beijing on December 11th.

The DatacenterDynamics Awards recognize innovation, leadership and ‘out of the box’ thinking in the data center industry across the world.

The first DatacenterDynamics Awards of Greater China Region introduced six award categories, including Future Thinking & Design Concepts, Data Center Blueprints, Innovation in the Mega-data center, Innovation in Outsourcing, Improved Data Cente Efficiency and Data Center ‘Special Assignment’ Team of the Year.

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 North America. 

Since launching in 2007 in London, the DatacenterDynamics Awards have expanded globally and are widely regarded as the ‘Oscars’ in the data center industry.

The full list of winners of the inaugural Greater China Region:

Category: Future Thinking & Design Concepts
Sponsored by IDX

Winner: Energy Virtualization Project of GCCA

As introduced by GCCA, energy virtualization technology can adjust energy allocation dynamically according to the distribution of IT computing resources and can provide strong support for the virtualization of computing resources, thus enhancing the flexibility and energy efficiency of data centers.

gEnergyRouter developed by GCCA is the key for realizing energy virtualization, according to Stone Tseng, CPO of GCCA. As a distributed and modular intelligent power supply product, gEnergyRouter will form an energy pool by connecting with the Micro DC-Grid, and then the intelligent management software gEnergyManager will achieve energy virtualization. gEnergyRouter also supports the input of green energies, such as the solar energy.

Stone says GCCA’s energy virtualization has won a wide range of customers including data center service providers and electronic device manufacturers. At present, it is working with local partners to deploy energy virtualization solutions on a large scale in Tianjin and Chongqing.

Established in 2010 and with headquarters in Taiwan and business operations in China and United States, GCCA specializes in providing green cloud computing solutions, including energy routers, One-Stop-Shopping All-in-One Container and a Green Modular Data Center.

Category: Data Center Blueprints
Sponsored by Xiangjiang Stock

Winner: Huawei’s K3 Desktop Cloud Containerized Data Center

Located in Shenzhen, this data center is designed according to Tier 4 standards with no single point of failure for its power distribution and cooling systems.

With a capacity to support 20,000 users for desktop cloud computing services, it is one of the largest containerized desktop cloud data centers with the highest tier ranking in the world, Huawei said.

Huawei completed the modular project including planning, production, deployment and delivery within three months. Operation and maintenance is delivered without the need for 24hr staff support.

“This data center is located in a subtropical zone, which creates a huge challenge in terms of energy efficiency. By using highly efficient UPS, enclosed cold and hot aisles, highly efficient in-row cooling solution, high density 9kW/rack configuration and intelligent management technology the data center is able to achieve a PUE as low as 1.4, which is a remarkable achievement in an area with an subtropical climate,” said Zhang Mingcan, VP of Networking and Energy Product Line of Huawei. “The success of this desktop cloud project of such a scale demonstrates that Huawei’s Containerized Cloud Data Center Solution is mature and is now going for commercial purposes on a large scale.”

Huawei, established in 1987 and headquartered in Shenzhen, is the world’s largest telecommunication network solution provider and the worlds’ second largest telecommunication base station provider.

Category: Innovation in Outsourcing
Sponsored by DCD Intelligence

Winner: GDS’s Village Bank Data Center System Outsourcing Service

GDS took advantage of its nationwide data centers, networks, operation and maintenance systems, to provide one stop hosting services for Village Bank, a project to provide a complete set of consultation, planning, data center construction and integration services across China. The Village Bank project enables the customer to rent IT resources and operation and maintenance services according to its business needs.

In this project, GDS not only needs to meet the Village Banks’ requirements of opening branches across China, but also the regulatory requirements of China Banking Regulatory Commission. With GDS’s outsourcing services, the Village Bank is able to acquire IT resources in a rapid and cost effective way and focus its attention on its business development. Up till now, GDS has offered such outsourcing services for nearly 20 Village Banks.

Established in 2000, GDS Services Ltd. is a high-availability IT service provider which operates data centers nationwide.

Category: Improved Data Center Energy Efficiency
Sponsored by the Green Grid

Winner: IBM’s China System Center

Constructed in 2005, IBM’s China System Center covers an area of 2,200 sq m and is IBM’s largest independently operated data center in the Asia Pacific Region. By taking a series of energy efficiency enhancement measures, IBM succeeded in reducing its PUE from 1.78 to 1.4 with the lowest PUE being 1.25 under optimum conditions.

IBM’s China System Center achieved virtualization for more than 50% of its servers and uses thermal analysis instruments for locating hot spots and implementing corresponding measures.
By deploying in-row cooling solutions for high density areas, installing water chilled heat exchange blanking panels for high energy consumption equipment, and through the isolation of hot and cold aisles within the data center, IBM’s China System Center not only succeeds in enhancing its cooling efficiency, but also resolves the hot spot issues caused by high density equipment.

Ye Hua, System Architect for IBM’s China System Center says IBM has developed a set of mature methodologies for building highly efficient data centers. IBM servers can monitor temperature, energy consumption and adjust the power automatically according to workloads, resulting in 30% reduction of power consumption.

Moreover, IBM has entered into partnerships with many data center product and service vendors such as air conditioning and power supply companies to ensure energy efficiency is enhanced at every level of the data center.

Innovation in Mega-Data Center:
Sponsored by DCProfessinal Development

Winner: @hub’s 185 Data Center Project

With a total area of 19,000 sq m, a power capacity of 28.8MW and the ability to accommodate 45,000 servers, it is the largest customized data center in China. With Baidu as the end user, this data center is a cooperative project between @hub and Zhejiang Subsidiary of China Telecom, with the former in charge of investment, design, construction and operation.

In this project, @hub broke through the traditional data center design pattern by applying the ITIL capacity planning and elastic deployment design concept in accordance with internet application features and adopting many internationally recognised green data center technologies. The facility uses the electronic tool management platform based on the data center whole life cycle concept and creates the first “Intelligent Super Data center” in China. It was completed in less than six months.

@hub is a carrier neutral data center provider in China and communication infrastructure provider. Investors include the Shanghai Municipal Government.

Category: Data Center ‘Special Assignment Team of the Year

Sponsored by Hitachi

Winner: “Hurricane Team” of @Hub

In January in 2012, @Hub established a virtual project team with less than 20 people across three locations including Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou and across different departments both internally and externally.
The team established a measurable and transparent data center management system by using an electronic management platform based on data center whole life cycle concept. This provides data center construction, operation and maintenance services for customers in a timely manner with the quality guaranteed.

By cooperating with Zhejiang Subsidiary of China Telecom, @Hub proposed three design options for users including Baidu, Alibaba Group and Alipay and deployed a total of 65,000 servers across three locations in 10 months. It delivered against its contracted commitments in terms of SLA and PUE as well as the owners’ CAPEX and OPEX objectives.

Commenting on the Awards, chief judge Zhong Jinghua, said: “From the projects competing for these awards we can see that the development of cloud computing technology and third party data centers in the Greater China Region has been experiencing rapid and remarkable development. We can also see that the data centers are growing larger and larger.”

“The first DatacenterDynamics Awards in Greater China Region proved to be a great success. All of the winners deserve their awards and I would like to offer them my congratulations. These Awards are of great significance in two important aspects: they are a good platform for demonstrating the achievements made in the data center industry of Greater China Region, thus promoting data centers to evolve in an increasingly safer and more energy efficient manner, and secondly, the DatacenterDynamics Awards, by using scientific and fair evaluation methods, will serve as the benchmarking standard for data center Awards events in China,” Zhong Jinghua said.