Inspur will build ‘world’s most advanced data centre’ as part of new 8-point initiative in China
Tue 10 Feb 2015
Inspur Group Co. Ltd. will build what one Chinese government website describes as ‘the world’s most advanced data centre’ as part of an eight-point initiative which also includes the creation of a national industry data recovery centre and a national safety control service centre for China’s data security.
The new data centre will form part of £314mn ($480mn) of new investment in the Yunhai Science and Technology Park in the Henan Province of central China.
Described as ‘fourth generation’, the new plant will benefit from outdoor cooling and redundant modular design, and will eventually form part of the data provisioning to local government.
Agreements on the eight-point plan were confirmed at the Wudu Hotel in the Chongqing Municipality last November. In addition to the development of the technology park, Inspur will develop: a cloud services platform ‘reflecting some of the characteristics of Chongqing’; a data operation and Research and Development centre, focused on Big Data; a safety control service centre for the nation’s ‘data security’; a cloud-centric national industry disaster recovery centre; a ‘western production base’ producing high-level hardware (presumably for export, though this is not explicitly specified); and a training base centring on software development and cloud computing, among other fields.
The new park will also provide cloud services to the small and medium enterprise (SME) market, whilst the Technology Park will seek to attract over 1000 IT-focused enterprises, with the ambit of generating 10bn CNY (£549mn / $837mn) in industrial output.
The multinational group, which is reported to have received $20mn in funding from Microsoft and works closely with VMware, is based at Jinan, Shandong, and is China’s 11th most successful provisioner in the field of electronic information. Founded in 2000, Inspur is west-focused, having changed its name from Langchao (‘Tides’) with a view to post-national markets. Nonetheless it shares the ambivalence so common in Chinese IT business in regard to developing western markets – in 2014 the company, whose primary output is data servers, was able to steal business from IBM when the Chinese government decided that its Tiansuo K1 system might be preferable to Big Blue’s machines from a security standpoint.
