Compute, storage, and operations have become new drivers of data-structure development, and long-overlooked storage capacity has become an important foundation of the digital economy. In early June this year, Sugon Storage was first to build advanced storage capacity that is green, massive, efficient, fused, and secure, further resetting the value standard for storage capacity, and storage-application upgrades across industries continue to accelerate.

As the first vendor to put forward “advanced storage capacity,” Sugon Storage successfully deployed green advanced storage at the South China University of Technology data center, landing the first liquid-cooled storage system, expanding storage space by 25 PB, and bringing PUE below 1.2.

Solving the problem: liquid-cooled storage is key

As a Project 985 and Double First-Class Category A university, South China University of Technology has 29 national-level research platforms and 231 ministry- and province-level research platforms, the most among universities in Guangdong. Its data center widely carries research platforms and smart-campus services, providing dense computing resources for national research projects and more than 100,000 students and staff.

陆以勤 noted: “Finding a balance among performance, quality, environmental protection, and cost has become the data center’s biggest problem.” 黄建波 said: “The first hard target for the university data center is to bring PUE down to 1.2.”

As data centers move toward lower energy use, “solving the problem cannot focus on servers alone; storage has become a key breakthrough for cutting energy,” 石静 believes. IDC’s Liquid-Cooled Data Center White Paper also notes that storage, as a major energy user, will account for more than 35% of IT-system energy in data centers, second only to servers. With low energy use, high space utilization, and high maintainability, liquid cooling has become the next-generation cooling method for data centers.

Setting a model: full-stack liquid cooling points the way

With high-density liquid-cooled ParaStor storage, Sugon Storage essentially delivered a full-stack liquid-cooled data center for South China University of Technology, directly expanding nearly 25 PB of storage and cutting data-center energy use by up to 30%. “Tests show that after the integrated storage-compute liquid-cooled data center is deployed, PUE can fall below 1.2,” 石静 said.

The liquid-cooled storage system Sugon Storage deployed at South China University of Technology became the industry’s first successful deployment. The Liquid-Cooled Data Center White Paper also included the case, noting that Sugon Storage, combining solid storage-technology accumulation with leading liquid-cooling technology, was first to launch the industry’s first liquid-cooled storage system—an important piece in completing the full-stack liquid-cooled data center.

Beyond a strong technical background, Sugon Storage has a complete ecosystem of liquid-cooling infrastructure, storage-hardware design, and software-system development, enabling deep hardware–software fit, simplified deployment, and efficient operations, and providing reliable service for large-scale liquid-cooled storage deployments.

The successful landing and use of this integrated storage-compute liquid-cooled data center at South China University of Technology not only provides a model for green digital construction in research and education, but also brings a new solution to AI, operators, science and education, and other high-energy industries and scenarios, supporting sustainable development across sectors.