ZTE, Tencent to construct energy-efficient mobile modular datacenter

ZTE Corporation, a provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the mobile Internet, has joined Internet company Tencent to build Tencent West Lab, a fully mobile containerised and energy efficient datacenter.

The collaboration between ZTE and Tencent has delivered a datacenter that features an overall power usage effectiveness (PUE) level of 1.0665 (including photovoltaic gains). The figure is based on uninterrupted 24-hour load tests made by the China Academy of Telecommunication Research (CATR) and puts ZTE and Tencent in the position of leading international standards for construction of a green data center, say the companies in a statement.

ZTE is working with Tencent to jointly construct the West Lab data center which is fully mobile and modular in design. The new facility features innovation around cooling, power consumption, design structure, management and control. The key elements that have realised significant energy savings lie in two major areas – the cooling system and the power distribution system, ZTE and Tencent inform in a statement. The West Lab datacenter uses a power supply combination of solar photovoltaic + HVDC + mains power. “With respect to cooling, the project is the first in China to put indirect evaporative free cooling technology into business application. The EER（Energy Efficiency Ratio）achieved by this method can reach 16.0, which is five times the efficiency of conventional mechanical compression cooling air-conditioning systems. As a result, the project has realised the environmental protection and energy saving goals while also ensuring low operation costs and low carbon emissions,” adds the statement.

ZTE’s “T-block” design feature is also a key element in the project. Using a prefabricated container approach, ZTE is equipped to break the traditional lengthy civil engineering cycle of constructing a datacenter so that it can be constructed block by block in a modular fashion. The equipment can be installed within two weeks after being shipped to the site, says the statement. Equipment can be assembled and deployed in “mobile mode” to enable a transportable and mobile green and energy-saving datacenter.

The West Lab facility also uses ZTE’s self-developed iDCIM (datacenter infrastructure management) to enable asset unit management, smart linkage operation of sub-systems, and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) wireless management and control to help Tencent with operations and management (O&M) processes.

ZTE has also collaborated with Tencent and China Unicom in constructing the Shenzhen Pingshan Project, the largest micromodule data center in Asia.