Issue 12, Oct/Nov


FOCUS CHINESE CHALLENGES


Pacific, (Japan and Australia, for example, where the public awareness of environmental protection is high and corporate IT strategy is mature), ‘sustainable IT’ is still in its infancy in China. In contrast to the few multinational players in China such as Siemens, IBM, and HP, the majority of local CIOs who take direct responsibility for IT operations are still at the immature stage when it comes to applying ‘sustainable IT’ in their own business environment. Therefore, it requires intensive education and guidance for them to gear the company in the right direction.


green in the shorter term to follow government policy and reduce cost


Most companies focus on being


Siemens headquarters which contains its data center in Beijing, China


stem from consumers’ emotional and psychological needs.


With the pollution crisis China faces, green concepts are vital yet incredibly challenging. Besides, ‘sustainable IT’ products and services not only mean greater costs but also imply limitation. Starting as early as 2006, the Chinese Government issued a list of ‘Green IT’ product suppliers most government institutes and organizations are expected to embrace with their purchasing planning. However, this list carries few choices of ‘green IT’ products and most brands on the list are international.


Without sufficient monitoring from the government and a real statement of return on investment (ROI), most business decision makers prefer to take a passive stance and are reluctant to make any investment decisions along the green path.


Moreover, the concept of sustainable IT is not as popular as green IT at the moment in China: most companies focus on being green in the shorter term to follow government policy and reduce cost. How to maintain green and reduce cost in a sustainable manner, while continually supporting business growth, is still the biggest challenge facing a lot of CIOs today in China. Compared to developed countries in Asia


In the meantime, to accelerate industry-wide implementation of ‘sustainable IT’, China needs to develop a series of favourable policies towards the certified suppliers and green enterprises who had certain achievements in the ‘sustainable IT’ area.


DCDF: What challenges did Siemens face with it’s own data center build?


YRF: Amongst the challenges we faced was this need for capacity planning, recognizing not only the dramatic pace of technological change but also addressing the question of ensuring sufficient supply of electrical power to accommodate future IT requirements.


Servers are smaller than they were in the past and less space is needed to provide more processing power. However, more computer power presents the challenge of a greater need for electrical power.


Siemens worked closely with a capacity planning specialist from Intel to design the data center in the most efficient way, considering all aspects, from anticipated business growth to space issues, strong and reliable server capacity and adjustments to technological changes, ultimately looking for sufficient and reliable power supply at optimum cost.


One challenge of designing a world-class data center is the adjustment to local conditions. In China this includes extreme climatic factors. The South of China has to deal with extreme heat and humidity, while Beijing is characterised by high


temperatures in the summer and severe cold in winter – this can have serious repercussions in terms of the availability of electric power supply and air conditioning.


DCDF: Did you have any particularly unusual security and safety guidelines you were working with for this data center?


YRF: One example of the many challenges handled by our experts is earthquake security. The German earthquake standard differs from the Chinese one. The building must conform to zone 4 earthquake standards according to German specifications. In China, for Beijing especially, the requirements are even stricter.


Both the fire safety and security systems are centrally managed and controlled through the danger management station from Siemens. This provides centralized supervision and handling of all safety and security alarms by enabling interaction between the different functionalities, thereby providing an efficient incident response at all times.


DCDF: There has been a significant push toward cloud computing by the Chinese Government. Is this something Siemens can, or will cater for in future?


YRF: On-demand scalability, flexibility, usage-based pricing models and optimized capital costs have all impacted on IT environments. These new demands and the corresponding information technologies resulted in what is known commonly by the vague term “cloud computing”.


Siemens China has adopted virtualization since 2006, the core technology enabler of a “cloud”.


In line with the recent Chinese policy entitled “Energy Saving and Emission Reduction” which targets medium and large-sized local enterprises to reduce their energy consumption, the concept of cloud computing that enables shared IT environment in a cloud together with green computing/IT have been gaining increasing popularity since 2008. This helps to cut down the energy usage and associated operational costs through resource optimization and virtualization, especially in the infrastructure field. Cloud services can improve energy efficiency by a factor of five relative to non-virtualized systems. 


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