Increasing awareness and computerization is propelling the growth of data centers in the country. Gartner predicts that the total data center capacity in India will reach 5.1 million square feet by 2012, growing at a CAGR of 31 percent. This is partly fueled by the fact that India is expected to be the data center hub for markets such as the Middle East and South East Asia. There are also instances of European customers opting to host their data centers in India.

The data center requirements in the country are currently fueled by the large enterprise segment. Being on a high growth drive, Indian enterprises are steadily enhancing the capabilities of their data centers while simultaneously building new data centers. For example, industry segments such as BFSI and telecom are witnessing their second phase of data center upgradation as a result of growing capacity, obsolescence or availability of higher performance infrastructures.

Observes Saumya Upadhyaya, Industry Analyst, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan, South Asia & Middle East, “The BFSI segment has regulatory requirements of data backup and disaster recovery while the telecom segment is witnessing rapid growth in subscribers and expanding its technological infrastructures.” Recent initiatives from the Government of India to digitize content and automation will also increase the demand for data centers across states in India.

The benefits of Virtualization
In the current environment, data centers are getting strained as organizations grow and scale up their businesses into global operations. For such enterprises, virtualization offers a convenient solution. By virtualizing the resources of a data center, global enterprises can offer services across the globe from a single centralized data center. Thus organizations can reduce operational costs and increase asset effectiveness.

Says Sumit Mukhija, National Sales Manager - Data Centre, Cisco India & SAARC, “Virtualization brings in benefits like increased resource utilization, decreased power and cooling consumption, faster provisioning, higher availability and savings in physical rack space requirements. These inherent benefits of virtualization result in ‘greening’ of the data center as well. Further, consolidation and virtualization provide a robust platform for ‘Utility or cloud’ that enables the IT organizations to provide IT as a service back to their lines of businesses/business units.”

Tridib Bordoloi, Chief Engineer, Press Trust of India (PTI), feels that before adopting virtualization, it is important to centralize and consolidate applications. Bordoloi recently undertook a vast project to centralize a number of applications that the company was running in silos. Though PTI has not yet adopted virtualization, Bordoloi believes that virtualization is inevitable in today’s environment.

Many organizations in India are using the power of virtualization to further increase the efficiency of their data centers. “From server and storage consolidation, to disaster recovery and high availability, to virtual client platforms, and finally into the cloud, end-to-end virtualization can provide an organization the ability to consolidate server resources to improve utilization, reduce data center floor space requirements, cut power and cooling costs, do faster provisioning, and simplify management,” says Ganesh Mahabala, Regional Director, VMware India & SAARC.
Adds Upadhyaya, “End-to-end virtualization helps in eliminating virtualization silos and uses end-to-end failure automation practices to detect failure and recover from the outage by fixing or replacing the affected device from the network.”

IDC predicts that energy consumption and space constraints will continue to drive investments in transforming the data center, with virtualization and consolidation of the server environment being the initial focus areas. Today, virtualization has moved beyond the stage of early adoption, especially with respect to server virtualization. Customers are beginning to adopt hypervisor technology into production systems, and are experimenting with ways to leverage this technology to seamlessly move applications from one environment to another.

Painting the Data Center Green
Green is the new mantra, and a host of organizations in India are exploring every possibility of saving on energy costs. Says Sanjeev Gupta, Service Product Line Leader, Site & Facilities Services, IBM India/South Asia, “As hardware purchases go up and organizations deploy high-density computing and network storage for mission-critical applications, there is an immediate impact on energy consumption for IT resources. This further impacts the need for implementing environments that ensure high performance levels and longevity of the server and storage environment, leading to the demand for ‘Green Data Centers’.”
In a tropical country like India, companies mainly rely on air conditioning units to keep servers at the right temperature. The more powerful the machine, the more cool air is required to keep the machine from overheating.

To meet these challenges, data centers have undergone changes in design to accommodate rapidly changing server technologies over the past 5 to 7 years. Servers that used about 150W power and 4 to 6 RUs of physical space are now replaced with servers using 3kVA in 8 RU space. This has necessitated radical approaches for supplying power and cooling requirements to such high-density racks.

Air cooling is predominantly the preferred model due to its cost efficiency and ease of deployment. Using segregated rack aisles for hot and cold air, many data centers have been able to achieve significant improvement and quickly dissipate the heat out of the racks and the collocation rooms. However, this approach is not without its problems.

Says Prashant Gupta, Head of Solutions, India, Verizon Business, “Air cooling does have limitations as the heat density increases. New technologies using liquid- and gas-based cooling agents may perform more optimally to take the heat out efficiently from the server racks.”

In addition, Gupta says that intelligent power management systems can play a huge role in efficiently managing power delivery. Technologies combining monitoring, reporting, and adaptive management functionality of power and cooling resources, combined with new power and cooling design innovations, will help in better efficiencies and reduction in heat generation.

On the power front, latest technologies like dynamic UPS systems, transformerless UPS and IGBT based UPS systems are getting popular due to better efficiencies. Explains P K Saji, Senior VP (Global Infrastructure Operations), Sify Technologies, “Today, we have racks that are redesigned to give better performance. We also have technologies such as cold aisle containment and inrow cooling that are improving the efficiency of the cooling infrastructure.” Saji says that more focus is now being put on measuring and monitoring the non-IT infrastructure that helps enterprises in identifying the areas that require attention.

Green data centers don't just save energy—they reduce the need for expensive infrastructure upgrades to deal with the increased demand for power and cooling. By increasing the efficiency in power usage and cooling, companies will be able to achieve a better carbon footprint. Using efficient alternative power generation technologies, organizations can reduce their carbon footprint by a significant margin, as data centers are heavy power users. Outsourcing data centers to service providers can also help organizations in reducing their carbon footprint.

The impact of cloud computing
The latest buzzword in the industry today is cloud computing. This is essentially because it has the potential to completely revamp the way an organization works. According to IDC reports, cloud computing is reshaping the IT marketplace, creating new opportunities for suppliers and catalyzing changes in traditional IT offerings. This will have a tremendous impact on the way data centers are built today, and in the future.
Analysts believe that with the advent of cloud computing, efficiency levels in data centers will go up significantly.

“India today contributes to 8 percent of the global data center services market and hence there is huge potential in growth of the USD 1 billion market that is available today. Over a period of time, India will be ready to become a hub for cloud centric data center implementations,” says Vikas Arora, Group Director, Enterprise Services Division, Microsoft India. That said, the adoption of cloud computing will be limited unless the biggest concern surrounding security is adequately addressed.

Says Sharad Sanghi, CEO & MD, Netmagic Solutions, “We agree with Gartner when the firm pointed out last year that cloud computing has ‘unique attributes that require risk assessment in areas such as data integrity, recovery, and privacy, and an evaluation of legal issues in areas such as e-discovery, regulatory compliance, and auditing.’ We ensure that we are up-to-date as far as external audits and security certifications are concerned.”

In the future, as more applications move to the cloud, expect enterprises to consume applications directly from the data centers of established managed service providers or SaaS vendors. Since ERP applications are the first choice while building the IT set up for any enterprise, hosted ERP is one of the leading applications available on a hosted model. The demand for hosted CRM is equally robust.

The importance of physical security
Physical theft and intentional sabotage factor in the top 10 causes of disasters. Hence, in addition to making significant enhancements with respect to network security technologies and measures, it is important to prevent physical theft of IT data and infrastructure.

“At the physical security level, the building must be constructed to prevent forced entry from outside using solid concrete walls. In addition, significant electronic surveillance must be used for perimeter security—also all entrances and exits must be installed with video surveillance equipment,” explains Gupta from Verizon. Within the data centers, all areas of the collocation rooms must be monitored with video cameras. Typically, video surveillances are recorded and retained for a number of weeks for audit purposes.
In addition to video surveillance, electronic access controls restrict and monitor entries and exits of all critical areas of the data centers. The access controls could include card access supplemented with biometric controls such as fingerprint, iris scanners etc.

To meet the emerging needs of business, enterprises are today building purpose-built data center facilities that implement multiple levels of physical security. Accordingly, vendors have been quick to launch specific products to capitalize on these opportunities.

Says Sanjeev Gupta from IBM, “We recently announced a ‘Scalable Modular Server Room (SMSR)’ that addresses mid-market data center requirements. This comes with complete provision for safety and security. SMSR includes a fire retardant server room, which ensures protection from water, humidity and noise.”
There are a number of issues plaguing the data centers today. The bottom line is that there is no single solution for all problems. An incremental approach is often the best for organizations to solve their data center woes through the adoption of virtualization technologies and the latest power and cooling technologies.