Break the mold: the brand-new IDC power solutions

At the Beijing Data Center Annual Summit on 20 November 2019, Shuiwang Liu, Senior Expert of Data Center Infrastructure at Alibaba, and Chih-Chiang Chan, Technical Director of Delta’s CISBU, announced that Delta and Alibaba have jointly launched a new IDC (Internet Data Center) power solution—the Data Center Panama Power Solution. High-voltage DC power supplies are a trend in China, and Alibaba was looking for a reliable technical partner with excellent technical competencies, which culminated in the collaborative “Panama Power Solution” project. In the autumn of 2017, Chan was invited to Alibaba to discuss issues such as multiple links and complex power distribution within the current IDC power architecture. Subsequently, Delta proposed an architecture that integrates transformers and modular rectifiers. It has obvious advantages over traditional solutions, such as high efficiency, reliability, easy operation and low maintenance. The outlook is therefore promising. After finalizing the architecture, Delta's R&D team in Shanghai and Chungli immediately began the product development process. In spring 2018, by virtue of Delta's extensive experience in power efficiency, a 600kw prototype was developed within half a year. It was then tested in the lab and in operations with excellent performance for one and a half years. The team has endeavored to optimize the product architecture and it further increased the power to 1.2MW. At present, more than 50MW has been produced and shipped.

Liu stated that, compared to traditional IDC power solutions, the Panama Power Solution has achieved 98.5% module efficiency which reduced the number of devices by 40%. Combining Delta's power management technology with Alibaba's vast background in cloud computing, the collaborative project came to fruition and the 10kV-direct-to-240V DC (or 336V DC) Panama Power Solution was launched, taking the progress of IDC power supply technology to new heights. 

Stable, scalable and energy-efficient

The power architecture of the Data Center Panama Power Solution is compact and highly reliable, ensuring that the power system can operate continuously for five years. Compared to traditional power solutions for data centers, this solution brings the cost of equipment and construction down by 40%, and reduces floor area by 50%. The innovations of the Panama Power Solution revolutionizes traditional power architecture for IDCs by integrating electric and magnetic circuits. A streamlined power supply directly transforms medium voltage 10KV AC to 240V DC, replacing the many relays between medium voltage and DC output, resulting in a more efficient and reliable system. The product is characterized by super high efficiency, high reliability, high power density, high power capacity, and low maintenance. Module scalability allows the capacity of a single system reach over 2.5MW, which meets the increasing central demands of future data centers for productization, high reliability, intelligentization, high efficiency, and rapid deployment.

With its core technological capability in power electronics, and decades of experience in power supply development, Delta has been providing energy-efficient power management solutions to customers worldwide. The Panama Power Solution which was launched in cooperation with Alibaba can improve the efficiency of data center power supplies by 3% and reduce the total investment cost of power supplies and distribution by 20%. It is the latest generation of DC power products designed to address the DC power requirements of data centers for cloud service providers and telecom operators, and it has been successfully applied to some of Alibaba’s data centers in Zhejiang and Jiangsu. The product of a joint effort with Alibaba in China is also gradually adopted by Alibaba’s data centers overseas. This successful collaboration proves Delta’s CISBU has a technical forte in HVDC solutions. In the future, Delta can also apply its successful experience and offer its services to overseas cloud service providers. In addition to a turnkey equipment solution, it can provide enterprises with counselling services for rapid implementation.



Shuiwang Liu, Senior Expert of Data Center Infrastructure at Alibaba, and Chih-Chiang Chan, Technical Director of Delta’s CISBU, photographed at the 2019 Data Center Annual Summit