Alibaba Group, the world’s largest online and mobile commerce company, will share its newly-developed data centre technology with the Open Compute Project (OCP). OCP's mission is to apply the benefits of open source to hardware and rapidly increase the pace of innovation in, near and around the data centre, and beyond.
Shanyuan Gao, Chief Architect of Alibaba Infrastructure Services, said: “We look forward to collaborating with OCP and its members around the world to drive the development and adoption of further technological breakthroughs intended to deliver an even greater impact for the industry, and we already have plans to contribute our innovations to OCP.”
Alibaba has been devoted to developing green data centre technology - technology that aims to significantly reduce energy consumption and drive the development of more environmentally-friendly data centres. Alibaba's take on immersion cooling is a highly-efficient green data centre solution. It involves an immersed, liquid-cooling server solution that uses insulating coolant instead of traditional air-cooling equipment. The coolant absorbs the heat of the components before turning into gas, which is then liquefied back into the main cabinet for reuse. It is estimated that data centres with immersion cooling can reduce energy consumption significantly and lower operation costs by 20%.
As it does not require air conditioning or other large refrigeration equipment, Alibaba's immersion cooling technology can be deployed anywhere, delivering space savings of up to 75%. It also significantly improves computing density, with its Power Usage Efficiency reaching as low as 1.0, beating the current industry average worldwide.
The technology is now in the production phase and soon will be ready for deployment. It will be initially used in Alibaba Cloud data centres before being made more widely available. Alibaba Cloud is the group’s cloud computing arm.
Alibaba is a veteran adopter of eco-friendly data centre technology. In 2015, Alibaba Cloud built the first data centre in China that uses water-cooling technology, at Qiandao Lake near Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, where the company is headquartered. The stable temperature of the lake water allows Alibaba Cloud’s East China Data Center to benefit from free cooling for 90% of its operating time, driving down energy consumption by more than 80% compared to mechanical cooling and making it one of the most energy-efficient data centres in the world at the time of its construction.
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