China turns ancient caves into big data treasury

DATA TREASURY IN MODERN DAYS

In Gui'an New Area, the Chinese tech giant Tencent built a data center based on the shape of mountain caves. The Gui'an Qixing data center covers about 470,000 square meters, with over 30,000 square meters inside tunnel caves. Seen from a distance, the data center lies covered in green vegetation, no different from natural mountain caves.

As China's first cavern data center, it can accommodate 300,000 servers, among which one-sixth are inside its five tunnel caves to store the company's most crucial big data.

Tencent constructed the cave data center while restoring its surrounding vegetation to protect the local environment and make the center blend in. The design, inspired by mountain caves, can make good use of external cold sources and ward off the possible influence of outside air on the facilities inside, according to the company.

According to the on-site inspection conducted by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the center's maximum power usage effectiveness (PUE) was logged at around 1.1 -- the closer the value is to 1, the better the energy efficiency. Whereas for most newly built data centers in China, the average PUE is 1.73.

"It was the first time for Chinese designers to break through the conventional design concept of setting up data centers on the ground and to build data centers inside the caves," said Zhong Shan, a senior engineer from Guizhou Transportation Planning Survey & Design Academe Co., Ltd., who had participated in the Qixing data center construction.

Located in the hinterland of China's southwestern inland, Guizhou has a favorable cool climate all year around, providing natural "air-conditioned rooms" for busy heat-emitting servers. Fortunately, the province is away from major earthquake zones, making it safe for data "reservoirs." Moreover, Guizhou's determination to pioneer its big data industry has gathered a cluster of enterprises in the industry, said Zhong Yuanhe with Tencent's global data centers.

Setting up such data centers in Guizhou can save about 58 percent of electricity bills compared with building the same centers in coastal areas in southeast China. If calculated by 10,000 units of standard server racks, a data center can cut 130 million yuan (about $18.57 million) of electricity bills annually, said Jiao Delu, chief engineer of the provincial big-data development administration.