DATA CENTRE PREDICTIONS
failures to warn operations and
maintenance (O&M) personnel ahead of
time, or to furnish additional information
to aid decision-making.
assistants, home automation and
digital marketing.
But how does AI fit into the data centre?
While the world is just getting started
with exploring what AI can do, it turns out
that there are many applicable use cases
that can impact the data centre. These
range from using AI to improve safety
and reliability, efficiency and even in
the reduction of energy consumption in
data centres.
Pushing the envelope of AI in
efficient energy use
Energy consumption is a top
consideration for data centres
everywhere. The increasing demand for
high-performance computing across the
industry is driving an increase in highdensity
servers, the use of GPUs, as well
as specialised AI processing chips. These
systems generate significantly more
heat than traditional CPUs, making heat
dissipation an increasingly vital topic in
data centres.
This was the reason behind the
development of Huawei’s iCooling
intelligent thermal management solution
for data centre infrastructure. Before AI
is introduced, various equipment such as
air conditioners, chillers, cooling towers
and water pumps are simply controlled
by BMS to ensure the normal and safe
operation. The cooling system, however,
cannot run at the optimal efficiency point.
Huawei iCooling system incorporates
Deep Learning to draw the appropriate
correlations between various cooling
equipment with actual IT loads and
environment variables.
ONE OF THE
CHIEF USES OF
AI IS SURELY TO
IMPROVE THE
SAFETY AND
RELIABILITY OF
DATA CENTRES.
The iCooling system achieves this by
analysing a vast amount of historical
data and the impact on energy
consumption to create a PUE prediction
model. An optimisation algorithm then
establishes the ideal parameters which
are transmitted to various control
systems. At Huawei’s cloud data
centre, Langfang, in North China, the
deployment of iCooling resulted in a
PUE that is 8% lower, saving millions of
renminbi in power costs annually.
Maximising data centre
value with AI
One of the chief uses of AI is surely
to improve the safety and reliability of
data centres. Before AI is introduced,
the fault can be detected only after the
component is faulty generally, affecting
the UPS’s availability.
By collecting information from the
power supply and distribution system,
AI-powered systems can predict
impending device and component
On that front, the Huawei iPower
intelligent power supply and distribution
technology was developed to improve
data centre availability. Equipped with a
response time measured in milliseconds,
iPower can detect, isolate and recover
from faults at sub-second speeds to
eliminate fire risks and improve the
reliability of a data centre’s power
infrastructure. It can also accurately
predict battery lifespan and health,
allowing preventive maintenance to be
performed before they fail.
In a data centre, IT devices are often
deployed or removed from shelves,
which brings a lot of fragmented
resources, such as U space, which
cannot be monitored or managed and
is easily wasted.
The AI-based iManager data centre
infrastructure management system
uses intelligent hardware and IoT
sensors to keep a close eye on the
data centre and reduce repetitive work
through automation.
The system manages resources such as
power, cooling and space to optimise
utilisation, relying on AI to intelligently
manage the allocation, deallocation
and operations of assets for improved
operational efficiency and reliability. With
the introduction of iManager, the resource
utilisation rate is increased by 20%.
Huawei iManager also supports network
management, with centralised managing
for multiple data centres across different
locations. As Edge data centres grow in
popularity, this can reduce the need for
site visits, allowing for more efficient data
centre management.
It should be no surprise that organisations
that require infrastructure with the
utmost reliability and performance turn
to Huawei. Today, we have delivered
more than 800 large data centres around
the globe and provided customers with
solutions that are efficient, reliable,
simplified construction and smart O&M. ◊
20 Issue 19
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