One of the key highlights last year was solution vendors and integrators positioning their solutions and services around how smart the data center can be. The Indian market for data center solutions got a major boost with a rise in demand from dedicated data centers, run by banks and telcos. The entire spectrum of solution vendors ranging from storage, server, security, to some of the not so glamorous segments like structured cabling, racks and enclosures, and specialized cooling solution providers.

Smarter, greener, and cooler data centers appeared to be the underlining theme during the year with solution providers completely shifting gears and positioning their products on these lines.

Growing Ecosystem
Most of the key vendors, by virtue of their storage and server legacy, have come a long way and have started positioning their solutions not as one piece but as a complete or holistic solution. As a matter of fact, storage and server, according to some industry experts, are very small component of the overall data center solutions ecosystem. The data center solutions market saw a major transformation in the level of offerings from vendors. The offerings now include some basic things like design, facilities management and other elements that go into making a complete data center.

Apart from the traditional components of data centers that include server, storage, security, and virtualization, things which were construed to be nothing more than good-to-know, gained momentum. This includes some components that make up a data center including racks and enclosures, cabling, power and cooling.

It is not as if cabling was not a part of the data center but it is only in the last couple of years that all cabling vendors have become intelligent, offering more intelligent solutions. This is a welcome change from the time they were known as plain vanilla cable sellers to enterprises. The unsophisticated nature was true of components like cabling, which now is termed as Structured Cabling, giving a sense of structured approach to cabling. The TIA 942 standard appears to have had good acceptance in the Indian market place. The standard prescribed the site space and layout, cabling infrastructure, tiered reliability, and environmental considerations.

Above all, there is a services and manageability part which has gained importance and there are specialized players that have gotten into this field which help analyze, optimize, and virtualize the data centers. For example, Avocent boasts of a manageability solution which allows data center IT managers to remotely manage things like power consumption.

Same is the case with racks and enclosures. The knowledge level about this segment increased during the last financial year, thanks to the increasing awareness levels of CIOs coupled with aggressive marketing by vendors. Racks and enclosures have become central to architecting the data center in the right format. Incidentally, Rittal, a global enclosure giant, has launched a data centre solutions product under the brand name Rimatrix5, which, the company claims, has got encouraging response. This includes racks, power, cooling, security, and monitoring UPS supplies. HP, in fact, imports racks and enclosures as it considers this a crucial part of the overall data center solution. The company does not want to compromise on quality by engaging local partners who, it feels, have not yet reached the required level of sophistication. Manufacturing of racks in India has to improve drastically.

Then there are companies who focused on the cooling aspect. In a typical scenario most data centers traditionally do not have an intelligent cooling infrastructure which ends up cooling the entire data center facility instead of cooling the specific vital components which require more attention. Vendors have come up with smart cooling technologies

Cooling technologies also showed dramatic improvement with HP demonstrating its smart cooling technologies at its own Whitefield data center, which it claims has helped reduce power consumption by 40%. Incidentally, HP, in November 2007, acquired EYP Mission Critical Facilities, a company which offered consultancy for data center cooling and energy efficiency. IBM too has been promoting its Cool Blue technology for data centers for some years now. The standard procedure now is inline cooling or rack level cooling.

While the immediate aim of working toward a green data center was cutting down on power consumption, it brings several other benefits in the processlower administration cost, better resilience, and lower failure rates. Another element in greening is cost which enterprises tried addressing depending on if the data center was new or legacy, in which machines needs to be migrated. It is not the cost of acquisition of technology which becomes important but the cost of running it, and cost of ownership.

Blade solutions also saw a spurt last year with leading vendors actively pursuing this as a smarter choice for data centers. As blades consume more energy, vendors such as HP, IBM, Dell, Sun and others are focusing on solutions that consume less power and achieve better performance per watt. According to some statistics, rack space used to consume 2 kw of power and also generated the same amount of heat. But with blades and more powerful processors, this power consumption and heat problem has got aggravated.

Everything finally boils down to the cost of running the data center, which happens to be on a higher side. There was some development on this front with an increase in awareness levels of IT managers who turned their focus on controlling this cost component. Enterprises were made to understand the benefits of going in for virtualization including higher consolidation, availability, security, resource utilization, among other things. VMWare, a division of EMC, announced an investment of $100 mn for its R&D activities which will also look at addressing the Indian market.

Data Center Services
With IT infrastructure outsourcing gaining ground and data center service providers creating world-class infrastructure, enterprises now have several options to choose from. Increase in outsourcing of mission critical IT infrastructure by the enterprises is good news for third party data center players like VSNL, Reliance, Sify, Airtel, and others. More and more companies are moving toward outsourcing hosting services to focus on their core business and transfer the headache of managing resources like network, HR and bandwidth. Banks and financial institutions have taken a lead in this. Another factor which is making companies rush to data center providers is regulatory compliances like Sarbanes-Oxley, which require maintaining of corporate data. Even Indian regulators like SEBI and RBI are increasingly setting norms for Indian enterprises for safe upkeep of data.

VSNL IDC, Reliance IDC, Sify Hosting, Airtel Enterprise Services are Indias top third party data center companies providing a range of solutions to enterprises. Netmagic, one of the survivors of the dotcom era, also went into an investment mode setting up a data center in Bangalore and the largest one in Mumbai.

BSNL and MTNL also have data center infrastructure. VSNL offers options for shared and dedicated hosting. It provides value-addition through managed services, OS administration, and systems administration as part of a standard package. It also offers some optional services like dedicated physical and electronic security measures, caging of co-located area, secure cabinets for equipment, diversely routed bandwidth, high-speed internet connectivity to tier-1 carriers, anytime monitoring of network connection and server availability, on-site technical support services, and vendor management services.

The Reliance data center offers a range of standard and advanced managed hosting services including co-location space and fully managed hosting of servers on rent/lease model. It also offers value added services like firewall, intrusion detection, backup, streaming, mailing, system administration, data base administration, load balancing, storage services and disaster recovery/BCP solutions. VSNL, Reliance, and Airtel have the added benefits of having their own submarine cable link.

Most data centers have put in place standard best practices like BS 7799, like ISO 9001, ISO 27001, BS 15000 to attract customers. The fact that enterprises are outsourcing their data center hosting to a third party calls for stringent security measures. Most data centers have standard security practices in place with solutions from leading security vendors. Sify has put in place an intrusion detection system and carries out vulnerability analysis to automate detection and correction of common machines, and configuration errors and vulnerabilities.

Regulatory compliance and the need to outsource infrastructure management will continue to drive the growth of the data center market in India. Research firm IDC recently observed that as IT managers are struggling with managing, simplifying and making available complex IT infrastructure, data center managers are increasingly concerned with very real and sometimes limiting factors such as floor space, power and cooling.

Future Outlook
There was some talk of data centers in a box kind of concept which is being pursued by companies like Sun Microsystems. This primarily is a pre-fabricated box which fits in certain number of servers with other components smartly fitted in and can be used as plug and play. The idea is to utilize the real estate and the space crunch that has been plaguing the industry for the last many years. Companies like Google and Microsoft too appear to have jumped into the fray with focus on containerized data center model.

On the services front, Regulatory compliance and the need to outsource infrastructure management will continue to drive the growth of the third party data center market in India. IDC recently observed that as IT managers are struggling with managing, simplifying, and making available complex IT infrastructure, data center managers are increasingly concerned with very real and sometimes limiting factors such as floor space, power and cooling, data center consolidation, and staffing.

Sudesh Prasad
sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in

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