Before the "Two sessions" in 2022, a major action that has been brewing for a long time and is related to the future development of the country is ready for development.

On February 17, 2022, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Central Network Information Office, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Energy Administration jointly issued a notice, agreeing to start the construction of national computing hub nodes in eight places, including Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu and Ningxia, and planning 10 national data center clusters. At this point, the overall layout design of the national integrated big data center system has been completed, and the "East number and West calculation" project has been officially launched.

What is "counting east and counting west"?

The "East count West count" project was born like a rolling spring thunder to accelerate the development of China's various science and technology industries.

"Counting in the East and counting in the West" means that through the construction of a new computing network system integrating data centers, cloud computing and big data, the demand for computing power in the East is guided to the West in an orderly manner, the construction layout of data centers is optimized, and the coordination between the East and the West is promoted.

As soon as the news was announced, a number of head companies responded: Huawei, Ali, Tencent, China Mobile and other technology giants have disclosed their industrial layout.

Huawei said that in response to the national "East number west calculation" project, the first phase of the Yungui 'an data center has been put into use, and the GUI 'an data center is planned to be Huawei's largest cloud data center in the world, which can accommodate 1 million servers, and is an important bearing node for Huawei cloud business.

Ali Cloud disclosed that the company has deployed data centers in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Inner Mongolia and Chengdu hub nodes for "East number and West calculation."

China Mobile also has multi-level deployment in computing infrastructure (such as computing services, network interconnection and edge cloud, etc.) and backbone transmission network transformation (network nodes, networking architecture, etc.) to match the national "east number and west compute" deployment.

Tencent also takes data center as the focus of construction, and puts into operation GUI 'an Seven star disaster recovery data center in Guizhou hub; Deploy two data centers in Huailai Ruibei and Dongyuan in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei hub; Qingpu Data Center in the Yangtze River Delta hub; Deploy two cloud computing data centers in Chongqing, the Chengdu-Chongqing hub.

"Counting in the east and counting in the west" is significant

At present, a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation is reshaping the global economic structure. As the core productivity of digital economy, computing power has become a new focus of global strategic competition. Up to now, the scale of China's data centers has reached 5 million standard racks, and the computing power has reached 130EFLOPS (1.3 trillion floating point operations per second).

However, the high energy consumption of data centers has not been combined with the renewable energy rich western regions of China. According to the data show that at present, China's 31 provinces (regions, cities) have all kinds of data center deployment, mainly concentrated in the first-tier cities of Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen and their surrounding areas, the IDC market development in the central and western regions is still in the early stage, and IDC resources account for less than 30% of the national total. At the same time, due to the increasing shortage of land, energy and other resources, large-scale development of data centers in the east is difficult to sustain.

      The High Technology Department of the National Development and Reform Commission pointed out that the implementation of the "East number and West count" project to promote the rational layout of data centers, optimize supply and demand, green intensive and interconnection has many aspects of significance:

● It is conducive to improving the overall level of national computing power.Through the layout and construction of national integrated data centers, the scale of computing power facilities will be expanded, the efficiency of computing power use will be improved, and the large-scale intensive development of national computing power will be realized.

● It is conducive to promoting green development.Increasing the layout of data centers in the west will significantly increase the proportion of green energy use, consume green energy in the west nearby, and continue to optimize the efficiency of data center energy use through technological innovation, large for small, low-carbon development and other measures.

● It is conducive to expanding effective investment.The data center industry chain is long, the investment scale is large, and the driving effect is strong. Through the construction of computing hubs and data center clusters, it will effectively drive upstream and downstream investment in the industry.

● It will help promote coordinated development among regions.Through the layout of computing facilities from east to west, it will drive the effective transfer of relevant industries, promote the data circulation and value transmission of the East and West, expand the development space of the east, and promote the development of the West to form a new pattern.

The large-scale deployment of "East number and West count" data centers will detonate the optical communication industry

        "East number and West calculation" will directly benefit the data center industry chain, from the data center industry chain, including IDC, optical modules, optical communications, temperature control facilities, ICT equipment, etc., are the upstream and downstream industry chain of data centers.

In terms of IDC construction, the current IDC distribution is mainly concentrated in the east, and there are few in the west. If you want to develop the number of east and west, the IDC in the west will be greatly improved.

In optical fiber communication, the mass data transmission from the east to the west needs to increase the bandwidth and speed of communication, and investment in this area is bound to need to increase.

As we all know, optical fiber communication has the natural advantages of ultra-large capacity, low power consumption, high security, and low cost of transmission media, and the interconnection solution within the data center and between the data center cannot be separated from the support of optical fiber communication related technologies and products. The large-scale deployment of data centers of "East number and West calculation" will certainly explode the optical communication industry.

First of all, the large-scale construction of data centers will inevitably drive the large-scale application of low-cost, high-integration high-speed optical modules and supporting products, which will further promote the optimization and improvement of optical module and device technology and autonomous capabilities.

Secondly, the massive connection demand inside the data center will promote the application of all-optical switching technology, further reduce the public number and transmission delay inside the data center, and further improve the integration degree and increase the intelligence of large-bandwidth granularity scheduling.

Finally, the transmission demand of massive data between data centers promotes the further innovation of optical transmission equipment, which makes the transmission equipment further optimize or design the transmission equipment required by the data center and further extend the application scenario of communication technology by further combining the application requirements of interface openness, intelligent management and control, and high integration on the basis of providing ultra-wide bandwidth.

As a leading provider of fiber optic cabling and connectivity solutions, Corning Optical Communications is committed to solving the reliability, manageability, scalability and flexibility challenges facing data center infrastructure.

Corning's EDGE™ solution is the industry's first pre-terminated fiber cabling system designed specifically for data center environments, and the new EDGE8⑧ solution delivers the full value of the original EDGE solution with the addition of superior network scalability that improves link performance based on an 8-core fiber design. It can also achieve 100% fiber utilization.

Corning EDGE™ solutions offer a range of modular end-to-end connectivity options that can be used in a variety of configurations. Each includes optical cable, distribution box, module, panel and jumper. Each solution offers faster, simpler installation, higher density, superior cable management, easier movement, additions and changes, and more flexible migration paths, and supports different approaches to data center management.

Corning EDGE™ Rapid Connectivity solutions offer a new path to ultra-high density, enabling more fiber to be deployed in less time on the data center campus. Fully pre-connected high-count cabling solutions eliminate the complexity of splicing and can reduce backbone installation time for data center interconnects by up to 70%.

Overall, the start of the "East number West calculation" project will accelerate the large-scale construction of data centers, promote the innovation and development of optical communication-related technologies and industries, and a new round of the outbreak of optical communication industry is just around the corner. Corning Optical Communications will contribute to the accelerated development of the industry on its own.