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The growth of unstructured data has derived enterprises to adopt new big trends like LAN networking, private cloud, public clouds, converged infrastructure, virtualization, Software Define Networking, power management in a big way.
Growth of unstructured data has led to the developments in Data Center design and architecture. It is the need of the hour for the companies at large. To increase the business growth it is essential for the large and small enterprises to streamline their businesses. To know what lies behind this move of optimising large data centers by the enterprises and SMBs, ITPV talks to the experts from the industry who are playing in the segment from quite a long time. Read on….
Earlier the computer system was complex to operate and required a special environment in which to operate but as the time passes the technology evolved and so does the industry of data center that starts gaining momentum among the large and small enterprises whose large amount of data generated needed an organised device.
Today, there are several technology trends available that will drastically change the way data center infrastructures are deployed. This has resulted in an evolution of datacenter architecture, which is increasingly moving to a shared and virtualized model. This transformation is more heavily reliant on the network than ever before. In a number of ways, the network now becomes the underlying foundation upon which the virtualized data center infrastructure runs.
Ashok shenoy, Regional Manager, Cloud and Datacenter Sales, Cisco India and SAARC informs, “At Cisco, our strategy and vision is to leverage network as the underlying platform to transform data center into a flexible, scalable and virtualized model. It combines an innovative architecture with an integrated technology roadmap, design best practices, and services, all designed to help customers transform their data center infrastructures, processes, and organizations with maximum effectiveness and minimum risk, cost, or disruption.”
To ensure a successful transition to Cloud, partnership with a data center infrastructure vendor is absolutely essential to deliver proven solutions and help customers on their journey to delivering IT-as-a-service.
Amit Luthra, National Manager, Storage and Networking Solutions, Dell India believes, “The demand generated today for Datacenters in India is high. According to a study done by Nasscom, India’s data centre market was at about $2.2 billion in 2012. It is estimated to grow by more than 8 per cent over the next 3-4 years. Companies are also realizing that more than having datacenters with a large capacity, it is important to have datacenters that are efficient, optimize costs, save power an enable automation of processes.”
Expecting significant growth and huge opportunities in the Datacenter market over the next five years, Niall King, Asia Pacific Regional Vice President, Barracuda Networks feels, “We have witnessed an increased adoption by Indian companies of the data center services and the government has also increased its cloud computing initiatives where it is directly setting up data centers and also using the services of the third party data center service providers.”
“McKinsey has estimated that the third party outsourced data centre market in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of 32% to Rs 5,500 crore by the year 2017. Some of the verticals that are expected to be part of the growth story include banking and financial services, media and entertainment service, manufacturing, international telecom providers and retail accounting,” he added.
End-to-End Solutions
To fulfil the demands the end-to-end solutions provided by the companies help in running the business efficiently and effectively. While setting the standards for quality and innovation with fully integrated power solutions for the Datacenter space is the need of an hour.
Amod Ranade, General Manager, Data Center Business Development, Schneider Electric IT Business India shares, “Our global portfolio of world-class products and services uniquely combine to offer end-to-end critical power solutions, providing customers with the highest levels of availability, reduced total cost of ownership, and improved energy efficiency throughout the life cycle of their installations.Power management and backup solutions has high performance, right-sized, modular, hot-scalable, 3-phase power protection solutions with ultra-high availability and efficiency for any size data center or high density power zone. The recently launched Smart UPS VT is a 3-phase power back up unit with hot swappable batteries ideal for small data centers, large retail stores, regional offices, and dense power requirements. The 3-Phase Power Protection unit is designed keeping in mind Indian usage conditions.”
Yogesh Sawant, director, partner sales and field alliance organization, India, Hitachi Data System says, “Hitachi Data Systems enables their customers and Channel Partners to deploy their own private cloud within their data centers.HDS partners with their SIs, and with their service providers and have them use HDS technology to deliver public cloud services to the Enterprise.”
Offering several proposition to its customers K.P.UNNIKRISHNAN, Marketing Director – Asia Pacific, Brocade informs, “We offer our customers four core value proposition. Unmatched simplicity: Reducing complexity and costs is a key IT initiative and one of the motivations for moving to cloud architectures.Non-stop networking: The networks that support cloud architectures must provide high performance and reliability in order to meet today’s stringent service
level agreements. Investment protection: The ROI for moving to cloud architectures will take too long to achieve if the only option is to rip and replace existing infrastructure. Application optimization: Cloud architectures need to support current and emerging applications to be most effective. A high-performance, intelligent network infrastructure is a critical requirement.”
“Through our Unified Data Center platform, Cisco and its strong ecosystem of partners deliver a fabric-based, holistic architecture that changes the economics of IT by simplifying the IT operations required to manage the complexity of the landscape ahead, enable the business agility companies require to succeed, and contains the infrastructure costs required to deliver high performance solutions,” says Shenoy.
Taking this trend forward, Dell India’s global revenue from enterprise solutions and services grew 6% in the quarter to US$5.2 billion and was US$19.4 billion, or 34% of Dell revenue for the fiscal year, a 4% gain over fiscal year 2012.
“Additionally, our converged infrastructure (CI) solutions enable organizations to that combine storage, server and in one package enable our customers to more effective and agile management of IT. While most companies provide CI solutions for Large Enterprise, we recently launched the Power Edge VRTX which enables remote and small and medium enterprises to benefit from the converged infrastructure experience,” explains Luthra.
Mohamed Asiq, Country Manager for India and SAARC, Extreme Networks informs, “Our products are positioned in India to provide value to those using Gigabit connections today and performance that takes them well into the future. From manufacturers, to schools/universities, all of these customers know they can come to Extreme Networks for a complete campus Ethernet solution that will drive their networks for more than three years into the future and be easily upgradeable. We use an extensive distribution and channel partner base in India (from Mumbai, Chennai etc.) that gives these customers the expertise they need to design and support their networks.”
Market Size
The SME market in India is a growing market with increasing adoption of technology for business requirements. According to research firm AMI Partners, the SMB segment has spent nearly $45 million in 2012 on network security appliances including UTMs, network firewalls and VPN solutions. Another key trend is the shift towards convergence. By adopting UTM a typical SMB can obtain enterprise level network protection and rapidly adapt itself to reduce the adverse effects of newly-evolving threats emanating from sources such as Web 2.0, VoIP, streaming media, IM, P2P, etc.
According to a study done by Nasscom, India’s data centre market was at about $2.2 billion in 2012. It is estimated to grow by more than 8 per cent over the next 3-4 years.
The square feet area for data centers are also expected to grow by 75% and the DCIM market is slated to grow by 13% by 2015.Some of the key growth drivers are:
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Demand from verticals like BFSI, media and entertainment, Telecom, retail and manufacturing resulting in the growth of third-party outsourced data centers. According to a Mckinsey report, the third-party outsourced data center market in India will grow at a CAGR of 32 percent to INR 5,500 crores by 2017
• There is a movement towards higher power densities in data centers where consolidation, high density servers, and virtualization are major drivers. Enterprises are going all out to replace traditional data center infrastructure technologies and management processes to more hybrid models, however the trend that is really looking up is the adoption of cloud computing by major companies, leading again to outsourcing of data centers. Customers are also adopting outsourced data center services to curb rising power, cooling and real estate cost.
• With data centers growing in space, companies are also looking at Data Center Infrastructure Management software, which allows users to monitor, optimize and intelligently plan power and cooling capacity in the data center. DCIM tools have become essential as the availability and operating costs of the data center have become increasingly intertwined with the facility.
Sajan Paul (Director – Systems Engineering – India & SAARC, Juniper Networks feels, “The demand for data centers in India is increasing because of the increased volume of data being shared over the network and the outsourcing of the organizational infrastructure to third-party vendors. Also, the declining prices of outsourcing due to the introduction of the cloud model and virtualized infrastructure have further increased adoption of data centers by organizations in India.”
Sunil R Golani, Avnet feels, “It is very difficult to estimate in terms of growth. The industry is growing at fast pace because of different technological innovations. There are lot of software solutions available through vendors from redundancy perspective.”
Companies like Infosys,TCS, HCL are more open to working with new partners compared to the Sis in the rest of the world. Also, Indian firms do not possess any rigid ‘one vendor loyalty’ trait. Indian IT firms are more flexible and efficient in completing projects within the stipulated timeline, which would help them bag more contracts from closed economies and new geographies.
Big Trends
LAN Networking, private cloud, public clouds, converged infrastructure, virtualization, Software Define Networking are some of the biggest trends that the organisations are adopting to run the Data Centers. As Indian organizations move through growth trajectories, it is putting significant pressure on their IT infrastructure, including data centers. The increased focus on data center efficiency, agility, reliability and cost optimization in India has led to a few interesting changes.
A virtualization-led consolidation strategy seems to be the common thread across most data centers in India, which would lead to moderate capacity growth. Indian data center managers are also becoming increasingly concerned about the kind of facilities that they should incorporate in their infrastructure such as power, cooling and space. Additionally they are concerned about implementing disaster recovery (DR). This is because DR solutions enable organization to optimize their costs and ensure business continuity.
Extreme Network has gone from three tier models to that of one and two tiers. Network management has become more dynamic and intelligent. The data centre has transitioned from a place of little change (1999-02008) to one of great change (2009-20015) with the adoption of new models (Cloud, virtualization) that drive much greater efficiency and of course, handle much greater loads of transactions, data and communications. The future will get more excited as open technologies come into play, driven by SDN, OpenStack, OpenFlow.
According to Gartner, The Indian IT infrastructure market is driven by hardware refresh, optimization and consolidation efforts. New data centre build out, primarily driven by service providers, is providing added impetus to this market. The server market accounts for the biggest chunk of the market totaling $753 million in 2013 and forecast to total $962.3 million in 2017.
Cloud computing is becoming an absolute necessity to be operationally more efficient and agile with IT infrastructure; mobility is fast becoming the access device for many; and with vast amounts of data being created, data analytics is in demand to gain new and instant insights. All of these trends have an impact on the DataCenter as it is accessed intensely and continuously. This is leading to the growth of high facility Data Centers at a rapid pace. Currently there is a pent up demand in the market with more and more companies looking at improving their IT adoption and this is directly influencing the speed at which Data Centers are coming up.
Data centers deploying private cloud and moving toward converged infrastructure. The enterprises are even opening to deploying and sharing public clouds too, based on a self service – anywhere, any device model. We also see the cost of storage hardware (CAPEX) is trending upwards, becoming a greater share of TCO(Total Cost of Ownership). The acquisition of storage is beginning to change from a CAPEX model, where we buy capacity upfront for the next 4 to 5 years and depreciate it over that period, to an OPEX, pay as you go, on-demand, acquisition model. More attention is being focused on the uncontrolled growth of replicas, and the need for life cycle management tools like active archives to reduce or eliminate the impact of replicas on TCO.
