Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on September 12, 2022 - September 18, 2022

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Malaysia has seen an increased and steady demand for digital services. This prompted businesses to start analysing their data so that they can create better products and digital services that cater to consumer needs. Furthermore, modern digital infrastructure continues to evolve towards supporting Industry 4.0 technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT).

In line with the Malaysia Digital Economy (MyDIGITAL) initiative, the government plans to accelerate its digital adoption to create a conducive environment that benefits society and businesses. The main vision of the initiative is to make Malaysia a regional leader in the digital economy and achieve inclusive, responsible and sustainable socio-economic development.

The future Malaysia envisioned through MyDIGITAL will see businesses, including micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) that form the backbone of our economy, enjoy greater opportunities to build and expand locally, regionally and even globally through digital revenue streams, and integrate various economic sectors to be more cost-efficient in the shared economy.

The vast amounts of data produced from digitalised activities mean that data centres have a huge role to play in managing and storing them. However, the resultant energy consumption is a cause for concern if it is not managed properly. Therefore, Malaysian businesses need to ensure that their digital infrastructure is managed in a way that ensures long-term sustainability. What is meant by sustainable digital technologies, and why is it so important to adopt them?

It is crucial for businesses in Malaysia to start building modular data centres, improve their software-defined infrastructure (SDI), and strengthen intelligent management, operations and maintenance, among other measures, to reduce the power consumption of cloud data centres and make them greener and more energy efficient, thus contributing to a better living environment.

Modular data centres can equip each transformation module with independent power distribution and refrigeration units, simplify and speed up the construction of data centres, and achieve flexible expansion. As a result, these data centres allow businesses to improve efficiency, save more room, expand flexibly, and cut investment in server rooms and operating costs, making management more efficient and operations and maintenance less expensive.

One of the keys to building green data centres is by providing more efficient computing power and data management capabilities at lower cost and lower energy consumption. This can be achieved by transforming architectures related to computing and storage using a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solution such as Application-Driven Networking (AD-NET).

As part of AD-NET, Application-Driven Data Centre (AD-DC) allows for a standalone deployment and an out-of-box experience, which help with the rapid deployment of businesses’ data centres. In addition to adhering to the concepts of cloud and AI-native architecture and open ecosystems, AD-DC is a great consideration for green and low-carbon development in a data centre application scenario.

Furthermore, green technology like the 400G (the maximum speed of data transfer, or bandwidth, in gigabits per second) switch continues to adopt the classical orthogonal CLOS (a kind of multistage circuit-switching network) architecture without central modules, which can help in improving the heat dissipation efficiency of the whole data machine while cutting down energy consumption. The most amazing fact is that its single port power consumption is only 20W.

Meanwhile, another example of green technology like 3D accurate temperature monitoring (with intelligent speed regulation of fans) can help some businesses in distributing airflow according to needs, thus saving energy and reducing noise as much as possible.

In addition to these, green technologies also allow for the central processing unit (CPU) and hard disk to be switched to sleep mode for energy conservation according to the running status of the system.

By building and adopting self-healing networks with smart technologies, businesses in Malaysia will be able to realise autonomous optimisation, energy conservation and consumption reduction, and self-governance and self-healing when it comes to data management and storage, among other things.

It might take a few years for Malaysia to drastically reduce its carbon dioxide emission, but with greener technologies being adopted by more businesses in the country, it is possible that we will see positive outcomes in no time.

Malaysia is set to play a leading role in Southeast Asia’s digital advancement, as the country looks to become one of the region’s hubs for data centres. The nation must therefore ensure that its digital transformation infrastructure and networks are managed sustainably, in addition to embarking on a 5G journey with the aim of nationwide network coverage. The next era of connectivity will initiate opportunities for businesses to expand their innovation and growth that will, in return, offer better services to the public.


Rockies Ma is the general manager of H3C Malaysia, a digital solutions company offering a one-stop digital platform that includes cloud computing, big data, AI, industrial internet, information security, intelligent connectivity, new safety and edge computing, as well as end-to-end technical services

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