As the world grapples with climate change and environmental challenges, green practices and energy efficiency have become pivotal for sustainable industrial growth. Building on cutting-edge intelligent technologies, China Mobile Henan (Henan Mobile) and Huawei have worked on a pioneering pilot project to develop a green and energy-efficient intelligent telco cloud. This initiative offers invaluable practical insights for the communications industry's transition to carbon neutrality.
As 5G-Advanced and AI technologies continue to advance at a rapid pace, operators' data centers are experiencing significant growth in both scale and network traffic. This trend not only drives the growth of the communications industry, but also inevitably leads to a substantial increase in energy consumption.
Building on its commitment to green, low-carbon, and energy-efficient development, China Mobile is actively exploring low-carbon technologies to achieve green network transformation and contribute to China's carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals. Guided by the concept of a "green and intelligent link to the future", Henan Mobile's NMC Cloud Resources Operations Department conducted in-depth research and found that in the early stages of resource pool construction, a significant number of servers remain idle when service VNFs are not fully deployed, resulting in wasted energy. Intelligently powering servers on and off based on loads can bring about substantial power savings and reduce operating expenses (OPEX).
Through close collaboration, Henan Mobile and Huawei have conducted in-depth research and implemented practical applications in network energy efficiency, jointly developing the Green Core solution for system-level energy savings on the intelligent telco cloud. This solution ensures stable communications services through various aspects including hardware, cloud-based infrastructure, and network O&M, while driving the green transformation of communications infrastructure through hardware-software synergy.
The Green Core solution features an intent-driven policy execution engine powered by proprietary algorithms. By swiftly collecting data center resource information and applying unified policy configuration and modeling, this engine intelligently determines which servers to power on or off, and manages their power status accordingly. This approach helps achieve zero power consumption for idle hosts, zero power-off errors, and zero power chip failures, ultimately reducing power costs and promoting low-carbon operations.
Henan Mobile has successfully pioneered the implementation of the intelligent power-on and power-off technology, yielding significant environmental benefits. The initiative is projected to save approximately 600,000 kWh of electricity and reduce carbon emissions by 54 tons, with a positive environmental impact equivalent to planting around 2454 trees.
This innovative pilot project for a green and energy-efficient intelligent telco cloud will set a highly exemplary and replicable model for the communications industry's green transformation. It will serve as an essential reference for the intelligent and green development of the global communications sector, driving the sustainable growth of the entire industry.