ComputerWorld says that China is employing IBM (IBM) to help it build a city-sized cloud computing center based in northern China’s Hebei Province. The cloud computing center is being built in Langfang, a city between Beijing and Tianjin in the new Langfang Range International Information Hub, IBM spokeswoman Harriet Ip told ComputerWorld. The complex will open in 2016 and be comparable in size to the Pentagon.
IBM will be supplying its data design services, while the Chinese firm Range Technology Development, (Google translation) an Internet data center services provider, founded in 2009, will also be working on the project. There will initially be seven low-slung data centers, spanning up to one million square feet, with room for three more units on either side. There are reports that it includes a residential area, most likely for the staff working at the data centers. A ComputerWorld article says the facility will mainly serve government departments from China’s capital and across the country, but will also be open to banks and private enterprises.
ComputerWorld cites IDC data that says despite such large-scale projects, China’s IT budget is five times lower than the US’s. IDC says China’s IT budget is growing at a higher pace than in the US. The research house days China’s full-year growth for 2011 will be $112 billion, while the US IT market will be $564 billion.
China’s IT industry isn’t that big at this point and “there is a lot of reliance on the vendors” to design data centers, Dale Sartor, an engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, visited about eight data centers in China last year told ComputerWorld. Mr. Sartor expects to see accelerating data center development in China, particularly involving very large centers delivering cloud services. Large data centers may soon be the norm. DoE, Sator says,
I got a sense that the cloud is going to be huge in China for both efficiency reasons as well as the ability to control … If everything was cloud computing and the government owns it, it’s much easier to keep your finger on the Internet and other issues than [by using] a very distributed model.
China’s rapid IT growth has been a plus for IBM, which said its growth in that country in 2010 was up 25% over the year before. According to ComputerWorld, IBM’s data-center business in China has tripled in the last four years. In 2010, China overtook Japan as IBM’s second-largest data center market, with the U.S. as the company’s number one market.
In terms of size, the data centers will be among the world’s biggest. The largest known data center complex is a 1.1-million-square-foot facility in Chicago owned by Digital Realty Trust, according to Data Center Knowledge, which has ranked the data centers by size.
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Not the same Cloud City that Lando Calrissian ran.
Is your data center that big?
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.