JD.com has completed layout of 7,000 data centres, in an effort that is aligned with the government’s efforts to align computing between eastern and western parts of China.
On February 17, China’s NDRC (National Development and Reform Commission), the country’s top state planner and other departments officially launched the “east-to-west computing resource transfer project,” involving the construction of eight national computing hubs as well as 10 national-data centre clusters. The project aims to efficiently direct computing demand from the east to the west of the country. By optimizing data centre layouts and promoting east-west synergy, the project will better optimize resource allocation, thus improving efficiency, JD.com said in a blog post.
East-to-West Projects
A spokesperson of JD Cloud disclosed that JD Cloud will subsequently participate in the construction of hub node projects related to the “east-to-west computing resource transfer project,” build low-carbon and energy-saving data centres and construct a more flexible and efficient infrastructure system to promote industrial digitalization. Several of JD’s data centres are already located in hubs of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, Yangtze River Delta, and the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle to serve the initiative.
This includes JD Cloud’s Langfang data centre in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region hub uses a high-temperature water system to cool CPUs through large-scale adoption of liquid cooling and heat recovery technologies, achieving a total carbon emission reduction of over 10 percent, reducing the data centre’s annual operation PUE to less than 1.1, saving the infrastructure energy consumption by nearly 30 per cent.
Also, China has approved plans to build four mega clusters of data centres in the country’s north and west with the aim of supporting the data needs of Beijing and major coastal centres. Also, the clusters will be built in the northern Inner Mongolia region, northwestern Ningxia region, Gansu province and southwestern Guizhou province, according to the National Development and Reform Commission.
The JD Cloud Data centre in the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle has introduced large-scale computing clusters, disaster recovery centres, and projects such as intelligent manufacturing as well as big data industry manufacturing and an R&D division, serving as a model of new infrastructure support for the regional gathering of the intelligent industry ecosystem.
In February 2016, Guizhou Province was approved to build the country’s first big data (Guizhou) comprehensive pilot zone. In the big data industry push, Guian leverages its geological stability, cool climate, rich ecological advantages and abundant energy to seek rapid development by creating world-class business environment and attracting industrial leaders.
“Like the South-to-North Water Diversion Project and the West-East natural gas transmission program, we should fully exploit the country’s system and mechanism to make integrated arrangements at the national level,” NDRC official Sun Wei stated in a recent interview, according to Xinhua.
