Background

For the banking industry, digitalization will be the strategic focus of the next decade. In June, China Construction Bank completed and launched the “new generation” core system it had built over more than six years, a milestone in the bank’s information-system history. 金磐石, General Manager of CCB’s IT Management Department, said the “new generation” will be the IT platform for the bank’s transformation over the next 10–15 years. It runs on three data centers that CCB has laid out in Beijing and Wuhan. Wuhan Nanhu Data Center is a key part of the “two locations, three centers” layout. It holds the bank’s most complete historical data for storage, processing, and use, supporting 37 tier-1 branches nationwide and 251 overseas institutions across 29 countries and regions. As business grew, how to maximize computing capacity on a fixed power supply and lower operating cost became a practical challenge for CCB’s Wuhan data center.

Sugon Solution

As the idea of the green equipment room took hold, energy saving and environmental protection became the main theme of data-center development. Cooling high-density servers became the bottleneck. In a tight space, densely packed electronics create too many hot spots, and traditional air cooling can no longer meet the demand. Liquid cooling has gradually been recognized as an effective way to cool high-density servers.

To raise computing capacity and cooling performance, and in recognition of Sugon’s technology, China Construction Bank’s Wuhan data center procured a full set of TC4600E—LP liquid-cooled servers and supporting infrastructure to run data-center operations with a green, energy-saving design. As the first liquid-cooled server solution deployed in China’s financial industry, the project reflects CCB’s exploration of new technology and confirms the stability, reliability, and energy efficiency of Sugon’s TC4600E—LP cold-plate liquid-cooled servers. The C4600E—LP uses a hybrid air-plus-liquid design: liquid cooling for the main heat sources (CPU and memory) handles about 90% of server heat. Monitoring shows CPU core frequency staying above 2.3 GHz while core temperature stays below 45°C, so the TC4600E-LP can run CPUs at higher frequency at low temperature and raise overall data-center compute.

Customer Benefits

Based on PUE measured during testing, the Wuhan data center’s annual PUE will be below 1.2. Compared with the 1.5 average required of new data centers in China, energy efficiency improves by more than 25%.