China Said to Be Constructing a Cloud Computing City

In recent years, China’s technology endeavors have grown in leaps and bounds resulting in the country’s rapid growth in IT spending. China is now in the process of building a cloud computing and office center in Langfang near Beijing that will be the size of a city. Expected to be completed in 2016, the complex will include a mega datacenter and it will be Asia’s largest computing center by floor space.
The facility that will be owned by Range technology, an Internet datacenter services provider founded in 2009, but also collaborating with IBM on the project, will be 620,000 square meters in size although there will be room to easily expand to more than a million square feet. The entire complex will cover about 6.2 million square feet and will be spread over multiple buildings. Although the datacenter will mostly serve China’s government departments, banks and private business will also have access to the facility. The purpose of the complex is to support the development of a new information technology center as there has been an increasing demand for cloud computing and datacenters in China.
Advantages of cloud computing datacenters include: companies save on capital costs through higher utilization of fewer data servers, more flexible architecture allows IT to quickly respond to changing business demands, IT can respond more efficiently to disruptions or attacks, IT can increase productivity by providing fast and secure access to information and applications, fewer physical servers in the data center leads to reduced power and cooling costs, better control over information systems, minimize technology investments, fundamental applications can be taken to newer and better platforms, ability to quickly develop and deploy newer applications, and eliminate systems that are under-utilized and require high levels of management overhead.
Experts are forecasting that there will be an acceleration of data center development in China, particularly involving very large centers delivering cloud services. According to the market research firm IDC, China’s IT spending is forecast to total about $112 billion this year. However, US IT spending is expected to reach $564 billion this year. In China, the cloud is going to be massive due to its efficiency and the ability to control its applications. Currently, the largest data center complex is a 1.1 million square foot facility in Chicago owned by Digital Realty Trust.