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With more efficient data centers, enterprises can have their cake and eat it, too
Green data centers are lighting the way forward for scientific research.
A managed service provider (MSP) in Spain’s Catalonia region, CSUC provides supercomputing, cloud infrastructure, and data management services to its members.
Normally, an MSP would have to choose between high data storage capacity and lower power consumption. But since CSUC adopted Huawei’s OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage, it has enjoyed both.
Co-founded by the Catalan government, CSUC provides high-performance computing, research data sharing, and data management, among other services, to universities, research institutes, museums, and libraries across Catalonia. It also connects 16 supercomputers to support the development of molecular dynamics and pharmacology research.
Despite its strong capabilities, CSUC faced challenges such as complex interfaces and pressure on its infrastructure. To maintain its competitive edge, it would have to upgrade its data storage systems.
CSUC’s biggest pain point was device power consumption. Europe has long faced an energy crisis, and power costs have risen five-fold in the last three years, leading to a 50% increase in operating expenses for European ICT enterprises.
High power consumption with low efficiency is doubly damaging. More than 90% of the space of CSUC's old storage devices had been consumed, and latency and bandwidth performance both encountered bottlenecks, significantly hindering the research of numerous universities and institutions.
CSUC used terabytes per watt as its measure of energy efficiency, correlating power consumption with storage capacity. On that basis, CSUC chose Huawei OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage to build a converged data lake for scientific research, meeting its growing data storage needs.
A data lake is a large storage repository that holds raw data such as text, images, and videos in their original format. “Converged” means the technology brings different types of data together into one unified system. A converged data lake essentially creates a one-stop shop for all or an organization’s data needs, making it easier to store, analyze, and use data efficiently in the cloud.
Moreover, OceanStor Pacific offers high-capacity density of 2PB/2U in terms of all-flash storage. Furthermore, it offers a power consumption density of 1 TB/W, which would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. The ultra-high-density model helps CSUC store an astonishing 44 Petabytes of data in just four cabinets.
Xavier Peralta Ramos, Data Infrastructure Service Manager of CSUC in Spain, noted that after the project, storage capacity increased 24-fold, while power consumption per TB was reduced 16-fold.
Green data centers are lighting the way forward for scientific research and the digitalization of education. According to a report by an international research platform MarketsandMarkets, the global market scale of green data centers will grow to US$140.3 billion by 2026, from US$49.2 billion in 2020, a compound annual growth rate of more than 19%.
Enterprise-class storage consumes a huge amount of energy in data centers, and the carbon emissions from such storage account for about 30% of a data center's total emissions. For that reason, it is imperative that enterprises upgrade their storage foundation.
Huawei OceanStor Pacific's power consumption density of 1 TB/W is its standout feature, and is strongly supported by a trinity of capabilities. Perfectly balancing bits and watts, it represents the first chapter in the story of green data centers, and significant milestone for the future digital economy.
