Following core ideas for the next-generation data center and working out comprehensive energy-saving measures, China Mobile built an IDC helping it reduce CAPEX and improve delivery quality and efficiency as well as the power usage effectiveness (PUE) for the equipment room. 

Opportunities & challenges

It was imperative for China Mobile Inner Mongolia to break the bottleneck in the development of traditional services and rapidly deploy emerging services such as 3G and mobile Internet. Vigorously following the China Mobile Group’s strategic plan, it was determined to construct a next-generation Internet data center (IDC) that would satisfy the requirements of full-service operation and platform integration, guarantee network security, improve management and operational efficiency, and support service innovation.

As one of the strategic nodes of China Mobile's data centers nationwide, the IDC of China Mobile Inner Mongolia was expected to evolve into a competitive, intelligent, green, and energy-saving data center accommodating to local service development requirements.

Customer action

In light of its own requirements, characteristics, and long-term development strategy and after extensive market research and competitive analysis, China Mobile Inner Mongolia developed the following core ideas for the next-generation data center:

Making plans in a coordinated manner to improve the return on investment (ROI);

Constructing the IDC by strictly complying with the specifications;

Building a "green IDC" to maximize resource usage and reduce TCO;

Properly planning and selecting IDC equipment rooms by considering all requirements for the support facilities;

Strengthening communication between the IDC construction and operation departments to support the design and marketing of high added-value products.

Meanwhile, comprehensive energy-saving measures were worked out to realize energy conservation during the process of IDC development and operation. These schemes included:

Optimizing the layout of cold and hot air supplies by using CFD simulation technology; adopting a precision air supply system and bringing in natural cold sources to improve overall energy efficiency in the IDC equipment room;

Properly designing the power supply scheme and selecting an efficient power supply system to reduce power consumption, thereby enhancing power efficiency;

Selecting and using high-density, high-performance, and low-power IT equipment to lower its requirements for space, power supply, and cooling;

Actively and carefully introducing IT virtualization technology to increase resource utilization, improve power efficiency and the system management level, and strengthen security and disaster tolerance capabilities.

Following these ideas and measures, the operator successfully completed the IDC with high quality.

Customer benefits

The IDC of China Mobile Inner Mongolia brought about many benefits, mainly including:

The E2E integrated construction reduced intermediate links. By doing so, CAPEX was reduced and delivery quality improved, while the delivery duration was shortened to 70 days so that the operator’s competitiveness could be improved impressively;

The all-around energy-saving scheme effectively improved the power usage effectiveness (PUE) for the equipment room. On the whole, energy efficiency was raised by more than 40%;

The comprehensive operation management system and cloud computing platform in support of the "wireless city" service were put in place to provide a flexible basic architecture for more innovative services in the future;

The project has become an IDC showcase of China Mobile, serving as a reference for IDC development in other regions.