To support Alibaba's record-breaking transaction peaks, five super data centers, including Zhang Bei, Ulanqab, Heyuan, Nantong and Hangzhou, will work together to provide computing power during the Singles Day shopping festival on November 11, said Zhou Ming, vice president of Alibaba Group and head of Alibaba Cloud's infrastructure unit.
The Singles Day shopping festival, first initiated by Alibaba, is the most important annual promotional opportunity for e-commerce platforms in China.
While Singles Day used to fall on November 11, Alibaba has extended the festival this year, with November 1-3 being the first half of the event and November 11 being the second half.
In Alibaba's Hangzhou data center, the world's largest liquid-cooled services cluster will have tens of thousands of liquid-cooled servers in production to handle the massive computing work of Double 11, Zhou said, adding the network cables can circle the globe.
Alibaba has being a unique cooling technology -- engineers soak the servers in a special insulating coolant to dissipate heat without the need for fans, air conditioners or other cooling equipment, reducing energy consumption in the data center by more than 70 percent.
In addition to the hardware, Alibaba engineers also designed a monitoring and management system suitable for submerged liquid cooling, reducing failure rates by 50 percent.
Alibaba Cloud completes three new super data centers, will add over a million servers
