Coal-rich region looks to 'clouds' for growth

New computing paradigm

In 1997, cloud computing was first described as a system that relies on the cooperation of computers.

At the time, US IT Professor Ramnath Chellappa suggested that the cloud would be a new "computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits alone".

In 2006, Amazon.com Inc launched Amazon Simple Storage Service, one of the world's earliest online storage services, based on the idea of cloud computing.

The world's major IT players, including Microsoft Corp and Google Inc, have focused development strategies on cloud platforms, seeing it as an important way to maintain their competitive edge.

Chinese companies started exploring the potential offered by cloud computing in 2008.

Jack Ma, chief executive officer and chairman of China's e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd, said in 2011 that it would develop a cloud-computing based operating system for smartphones.

It is reported that Ma recently visited Hohhot and talked with Nashun Menghe, Hohhot's Party chief, about the next stage in his company's cloud-computing center development plan.

It may be a good choice for Alibaba's major units, online retailer Taobao and its business-to-customer Tmall, to locate its data storage and transmission center in the Hohhot "cloud", Nashun said.

Alibaba's two online marketplaces account for more than 70 percent of the country's online retail market, with sales reaching 1 trillion yuan in the first 11 months of last year.

On Nov 11, Taobao and Tmall recorded single-day sales volume of 19.1 billion yuan. Its booming orders and online payment demand pushed the group to find a more powerful data center to support its rapidly expanding business.

"A stable and fast data processing system requires large groups of servers and uninterrupted power transmission, which can be provided here," Nashun said.

According to Nashun, Baidu Inc and Tencent Holdings Ltd have also expressed interest in Hohhot's cloud-computing industry.

A development plan released by the government of Inner Mongolia in December 2011 said that more cloud-computing centers will be launched by the end of 2013 in Hohhot, Baotou, Erdos and Chifeng.

"By then, the preliminary industry layout will be formed," according to the plan.

The regional government said that around 1 million square meters of cloud-computing centers would be constructed in the region by 2015, with around 1 million servers.