Planning to set up your data center? The experts will tell you
that it’s a bad idea to set it up in the midst of an
industrialised zone, near the sea, or in a low lying area. And in a
congested city where real-estate is a premium you will be better
off outsourcing your data center. With many businesses growing at a
clip of 30 to 40 percent a year, scaling up IT infrastructure to
keep pace with business needs will also be a challenge as space is
a constraint. And of course, a poorly designed data center results
in inadequate power and cooling.
P Sridhar Reddy, CMD, CtrlS
spends most of his time talking with enterprise customers to
understand their pain points and challenges. He says most customers
have space constraints or lack adequate power. “In many cases
the customer wants to go in for a high density data center with
blades, but their facilities cannot provide adequate cooling for
this.”
He says many customers, especially in Mumbai, have their data
centers set up in low lying areas; some of these are major data
center installations. Many of these are close to the sea or almost
at sea level. So these get water logged during the monsoon. The
salt content in the sea breeze leads to corrosion of electronic
components. In industrial areas, this corrosion is caused by the
sulphur content in the air.
“Because of this, many companies had either relocated or
shut down these data centers in the last two to three years. This
is a costly decision as it involves huge CAPEX, migration risks and
support level decisions,” says Sridhar.
Learning from the mistakes of others, companies today chose to
host their servers and IT infrastructure in carefully planned data
centers such as those built by companies like CtrlS and Sify (to
name a few). In fact some Telcos also offer data center hosting
services.
CtrlS for instance, has just set up a 210,000 square feet data
center in Mahape, Navi Mumbai. The state-of-the-art data center has
Tier IV architecture, 30 megawatts of power, with standby power of
16 megawatts. It has a certified PUE (Power Usage
Effectiveness) rating of 1.42. CtrlS has another data center in
Hyderabad.
“An organization can build its own data center within
ours, and this is a model followed worldwide. We configure the data
center according to their specifications and offer security as per
their requirements. We call this the DC-ready model,”
informed Sridhar.
An organization attempting to set up its own data center on
premise has to go through the long and tedious routine of acquiring
real-estate, installing air-conditioning, sourcing multiple phases
of power, obtaining permissions etc.
“It can take several months (or years) to set up a
standalone data center. But in the DC-ready model we can offer it
in a few weeks,” said Sridhar. “The major benefits are
that it is tailor-made for them. Also, the cost of running a data
center over a period of 10 years is 30 – 40 percent
lower.”
CtrlS is also offering a completely outsourced data center to
small and medium businesses. This includes hardware, software,
connectivity and services. He explains that SMBs have different
requirements from large enterprises. “They are concerned
about the total cost of ownership (TCO) and in infrastructure
maintenance.”
Cloud on Demand
While most companies prefer a private cloud, there are concerns
about upfront investments. To address this CtrlS offers a service
called On-demand private cloud. This can be set up either on the
customer’s premises or in the CtrlS data center.
Explaining this model Sridhar said, “In this model there is
no upfront investment. We can provide the physical hardware in a
matter of hours. Otherwise, the infrastructure scales up
automatically on demand. With on-demand private cloud we can offer
additional resources, through self-provisioning, within 30
minutes.”
While the On-demand private cloud may seem attractive to SMBs,
Sridhar said he receives enquiries from even large enterprises.
On-demand DR is another service that CtrlS offers. And Sridhar
claims it can cut down the cost of running a DR site by almost 60
percent.
“Typically a DR site is idle 90 percent of the time, and
on standby to be used in the event of a disaster. Yet all
organizations need it. We offer a similar framework as private
cloud for our On-demand DR site,” informed Sridhar.
Explaining this model he says an organization can use, and pay
for 20 – 30 percent of DR resources. A “small
fee” goes towards DR drills conducted by CtrlS during the
year.
“In the event of a disaster we provide additional
resources on demand in 30 minutes,” claimed Sridhar.
Sharing his plans Sridhar says he wants to scale up to 20,000 racks
in the next two years and 5,000 racks by March 2012. The company
(part of the Rs 750 crore Pioneer Group), is growing at almost 100
percent every year.
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