With the ever-growing Data Centres market in India, there comes a lot of challenges also. The biggest challenge is growing power consumer per rack besides uptime and other issues. Enterprise IT World tried to understand from Anjani Kommisetti, Country Manager – India & SAARC, Raritan & Servertech – brands of Legrand about his assessment of the Data Centre challenges and mitigation plans. Excerpt.
“Many times, availability of power becomes a hurdle at the rack to adapt these dynamic changes on hardware. This is where Raritan adds value to help customers to adapt the dynamic changes as well accommodate more computing per rack.”
Anjani Kommisetti, Country Manager – India & SAARC, Raritan & Servertech – brands of Legrand.
What is the trend in the Data Centres market, whether it is on -prem, cloud or third -party Data Centres growing?
In the Data Center environment, the future years are projected to be a period of consolidation. For businesses to operate successfully in the future, IT must be able to meet hybrid requirements without being disturbed by unforeseen events. New technology, new designs, and how AI can be used to improve agility are likely to be at the forefront of CIO/CTO discussions.
Data centres must be more technologically adaptive, scalable, and efficient in order to be more agile. The digital shift happened swiftly, but many people did not take advantage of technology to its full potential. DC backbone upgrading would be beneficial for managing digital traffic processing, which has grown significantly in the previous two years as the need for speed and performance has increased.
The rapid move towards distributed edge computing will be fuelled by the rise in cloud usage brought about by the adoption of IoT and the arrival of 5G. The role of edge data centres in bringing the cloud to the local level has has already grown critical. We could even see containerized data centres, which are modular data centres constructed within a normal shipping container! ‘Server rooms in a box’ offer a number of benefits for mobile and Wi-Fi technologies, and they may soon be as widespread as electrical substations.
“The rapid move towards distributed edge computing will be fuelled by the rise in cloud usage brought about by the adoption of IoT and the arrival of 5G.”
Anjani Kommisetti, Country Manager – India & SAARC, Raritan & Servertech – brands of Legrand.
What is the total market size in India and SAARC, and how is it growing through 2022?
According to Arizton’s latest research report, the Digital India initiative by the Indian government will attract more investments in data centers. The India data center market is expected to double its capacity in the upcoming years, which is driven by strong digitalization and an increase in cloud adoption. An increase in cloud adoption, data localization, and adoption of new technologies such as 5G and IoT are driving the data center demand in India. India data center market size was valued at $4.35 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $10.09 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 15.07% during 2022-2027.
What are the factors driving the Data Centres market in India?
The Indian data centre industry is passing through an interesting phase. Increase in smart device users and digitisation is increasing the use of smart applications which is in turn is leading to spikes in big data, data analytics, data mining, etc., hence demand for high powered data centres. The challenge is to accommodate more data in less space which means more computing per rack, hence more power per rack. All challenges need to be addressed while also achieving cost reduction by optimising racks.
The dynamics of the changing marketplace, where IT is not just a business enabler but a key player that provides a huge competitive edge, is prompting companies to be more agile in dealing with the growth of their IT infrastructure. CIOs must not only think of technology, but also in terms of consumer behaviour and consumer access points to see how one can adapt and modify their infrastructure to deal with the changing marketplace. Today, CIOs are forced to optimize their data centre infrastructure to the hilt in every aspect – be it power, storage, real estate, etc. There are various tools that are available to help CIOs in achieving these objectives.
The challenge for Data Centres industry is power consumption how the stake holders are working upon it and how Raritan is supporting their initiatives?
With growing demands for digitalisation, the need for more and more computing is obvious and data centre managers have to accommodate dynamic changes at the rack level. Many times, availability of power becomes a hurdle at the rack to adapt these dynamic changes on hardware. This is where Raritan adds value to help customers to adapt the dynamic changes as well accommodate more computing per rack.
With Raritan’s Intelligent Power Management Solutions, customers can identify critical gaps. A gap anywhere between 30% to 50%, seems challenging. With advanced technology features like programmable sequencing, Raritan addresses these challenges efficiently and allows the customers to use up to 80% of the allocated power whereas in normal scenarios the customer would be using only 35% at max. This way, customers can find a way to optimise the power at rack and accommodate more computing without much change in the infrastructure.
How automation is being an influential factor for the Data Centres growth?
The technology landscape is evolving rapidly. With trends like rise of hyper automation, edge computing and green technology will prove to be beneficial for our partners to modernise and optimise their operations. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) driving hyper automation is a result of the need for integrating various platforms, applications and huge amount of data types. Today, what is critical is how quickly you can process data and offer solutions that can bridge the gap between a product technology and consumer’s need. Data processing closer to the end device enables instantaneous actions, enabling channel community to offer better business value to the customers.
Today, most of the consumer devices or components that are launched for automobiles, health devices, smart watches or even washing machines are IOT enabled. They have pre-installed applications that help consumers control, reset, change settings, etc. at the touch of a button. In all this, there is a consumer request, programming implementation, and automation which needs end point intelligence. So it is a collaborative effort which encompasses thought, design, technology, and intelligence enablement.
For example, if a user is away and wants to switch the air conditioning on in his car so that its cool by the time he gets in, this is possible only because of automation. The request has to be processed over the internet which means that the data has to go somewhere and trigger something that is remotely available. For such large number of regular requests, huge amounts of data is generated. And this data has to be stored, analyzed, processed to help create a pattern to understand the needs.
Raritan’s investment in next-generation data centre solutions will help IT meet such management challenges. Today, we are providing customers with innovative solutions that help better manage their IT infrastructures and resources in order to deliver business value. We are also continuously looking at innovative ways to provide our partners with the tools, resources, training and support needed to achieve success.
What is your opinion on the growth of edge computing?
Every individual connected to the internet is influencing the way data is being made available to them and managed. As consumer behaviour continues to evolve, demand for better solutions, their availability, and performance have turned the Indian business landscape into a racing ground. The massive surge in data size with increased usage of IoT devices, virtual communication platforms, digital payments, growing demand for OTT content, etc. has led to enterprises gradually shifting to edge computing which happens at close proximity of the customers, thus lowering latency by reducing data flow. Compared to edge, computing at the cloud or core is a more tedious and time-consuming process as the data has to travel back and forth from a central server, that affects the decision-making capabilities of any business.
Gartner also predicts by 2025, 75% of enterprise data will be processed at the edge. Taking an example of an ATM – these are located where banks have majority of their customers. We can see a clear trend of microdata centers or minicomputers in each complex or being set up closer to housing societies or industrial sectors where it offers greater consumer proximity. Another trend we see is collocated edge data centers, that will prove to be commercially viable for all business types to use and benefit from – as we see continuous growth in data, it would be impractical to not make edge data centers cost effective. Edge data centers must also be mobile – shift from one location to another – the concept of containerised data centers presents a huge prospect as to how we manage data today.
What is the road map of Raritan in Indian Data Centres market?
Raritan is a proven and strong player in the space of Remote access management and Intelligent Power management solutions. As part of the Legrand Data Solutions (LDCS) family, we are addressing a larger portfolio in the Data Centres market which offers a complete one stop solution for all Data Centres infrastructure requirements, from design to deployment. We are focusing on providing agile solutions for Data Centres and our product portfolio is continuously innovating in this regard.
What is your competitive advantage?
Raritan has been always in the center of the data center with our IP KVMs and intelligent PDUs. And now being a part of LDCS, Raritan’s customer has access to many more products and solutions. LDCS has been formed with the objective of understanding what a customer wants and helping them setup data centres tailored to their specific requirements, right from the design stage onwards. Our approach is very flexible, and we combine or mix our solutions to offer the right services to customers. On the component side, we are probably one of the very few companies that offer a one-stop end to end data centre solutions. We differentiate ourselves on being a product plus solution provider – end-to-end data centre experts.
How are you mitigating the challenges of the CIOs in deciding on their Data Centres strategy?
One of the key challenges for any CIO is the power optimization and cooling optimization – meeting the PUE expectations while also performing better at lower operational costs. So, the key is the reliability factor, which the CIO cannot compromise on. But at the same time, they need scalability as the need is growing and the capacity or the delivery has to be increased. Added to this, the speed of adapting new technologies and components is always a challenge. At LDCS, keeping these three factors in mind, we focus on design and implementation for agility.
