Background

Energy-saving requirements have become increasingly strict. Provinces and cities continue to raise energy-efficiency expectations for local data centers and to drive PUE down, making more efficient, energy-saving data-center models more urgent.

As liquid-cooled servers matured, liquid-cooled data-center construction entered China Construction Bank’s view. In early 2015, CCB began surveying Sugon liquid-cooled servers and liquid-cooled data centers. After lengthy testing and improvement, the availability, reliability, low PUE, and low noise of Sugon liquid-cooled servers met the bank’s data-center requirements. In early 2017, CCB decided to work with Sugon to build a data center with a new architecture and model, maximizing energy efficiency while keeping CCB business stable, reliable, and available.

Customer Requirements

China Construction Bank’s Wuhan data center responded to head-office models and requirements for energy-efficient data centers and partnered with Sugon on a liquid-cooled data-center pilot. CCB Wuhan provided one independent vacant equipment room, required a liquid-cooling retrofit, and asked to deploy high-density liquid-cooled servers, liquid-cooled cabinets, and air-cooled cabinets (for other high-performance, network, and similar air-cooled equipment) to run office automation, channel systems, and access systems—creating a liquid-cooled data-center model while carrying CCB application workloads.

Solution

Sugon rebuilt the independent equipment room provided by CCB Wuhan, including power, fire protection, access control, monitoring, and other base data-center environment. On that foundation it built a new-form equipment room combining liquid cooling and air cooling, and deployed high-density liquid-cooled servers and high-density liquid-cooled cabinets for basic business systems in the CCB data center. Air-cooled cabinets host switches, routers, firewalls, storage, and other air-cooled products, and in-row air conditioning provides cooling and heat rejection for those cabinets.

High-density servers use Sugon TC4600E-LP. CPUs use cold-plate cooling for component-level precision cooling. The internal heat-exchange medium is liquid refrigerant, forming with liquid-cooled cabinets, distributed heat-rejection units, and an external cooling tower a fast, efficient, energy-saving, high-density liquid-cooled service platform.

Other data-center modules, including switches and storage, use standard in-row air conditioning for overall heat rejection, providing fast, efficient, and safe cooling. Air-cooled cabinets use Sugon row-level contained in-row air conditioning with nearby horizontal airflow, enabling rapid cooling in a tight space and raising cooling efficiency.

Estimates show that Sugon’s integrated air- and liquid-cooled data center achieves an annual PUE of about 1.2, delivering efficient, safe, and stable data-center operations.

Solution Advantages

Integrated financial liquid-cooling service platform:

Build an overall informatization platform for the financial data center, flexibly construct compute, storage, and network on a liquid-cooled data center, deliver green, energy-saving construction across the system, raise resource efficiency, and lower data-center PUE.

Intelligent IT data-center basic application services:

Based on compute, storage, and network services in the liquid-cooled data center, decouple the platform from resource users and, by integrating financial informatization applications and containers, provide intelligent basic financial application services.

Unified data-center resource and system management:

Build an integrated unified management platform and cloud resource service platform, providing unified management, operations, and monitoring, and delivering multi-plane, multi-layer service management for the financial informatization data center.