Raritan Leveraging the Trends in the Data Centre Market

Anjani Kommisetti, Country Manager, India & SAARC, Raritan & Servertech talks about the evolving trends in the Data Centre market and how they are impacting their business.

1. What are the key trends around Data Centre and distributed environments in India?

The Indian data centre industry is passing through an interesting phase. Increase in Smart users and digitisation is increasing the use of smart applications which is in turn leading to trends like Big Data, Data analytics, Data mining etc. Hence, demand for high power Data centres in trend and the challenge is to accommodate more data in less space which means more computing per rack hence, more power per rack. All the challenges need to be addressed while achieving the cost reduction by optimising the rack.

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 optimize the data centre in every aspect.

2. What are your growth and expansion plans to harness these trends?

Vertical Expansion was the phrase coined by Raritan which allows data centre managers to pack more computing power in one rack. It also achieves high compute density by bringing 3-phase power to the rack; these are deployed at the rack level which then provide single phase power to all the IT equipment. This packs in more power to the rack and frees up excess space which can be used for expansion at a later date, as and when required. So, vertical expansion will increase computer density and help in saving cost.

In India, customers are now beginning to realise the benefits of vertical expansion and it has been a learning curve for them. Industry verticals, such as, IT, BFSI, healthcare, telecom, e-commerce companies, besides government departments are experiencing exponential expansion of data centre requirements and stand to gain the most from vertical expansion.

3. Can you brief us about your portfolio of products and services that you offer?

Raritan, a brand of Legrand, has been in the Indian market for close to three decades. Our first focus was on making it possible to manage, fix and troubleshoot servers and network devices from remote locations, and then we moved on to creating power distribution units for more efficient functioning of data centres. Now, Raritan has made these PDU’s ‘intelligent’ through connectivity and Artificial Intelligence to an extent that they can help identify any changes in power trends, environmental changes, remote management capability, Security to racks through Smart locks, Asset management. Being part of Legrand today our services include racks, data cabling, Busbar, UPS setup, power distribution of the data centre, remote management tools, etc.

Raritan’s data centre power products include rack power distribution units (rack PDUs), inline meters, transfer switches, and branch circuit monitoring systems. Leveraging advanced embedded Xerus Technology Platform, all Raritan power distribution products improve uptime and availability by making power management devices easier to deploy, control, and manage remotely across multiple locations. Natively compatible with DCIM software, Raritan power distribution products allow you to easily scale new environmental monitoring and access control devices as well as gather actionable insights for quicker, smarter decision making.

4. How is the burgeoning BFSI space adding to the growth of data centres?

In the BFSI sector, there is a decent amount of consolidation – both in private and public banks. There are numerous legacy systems and it will continue to go for a long time. Our solutions help them to work with legacy systems and help them integrate with new-age systems. The size of the data centre is decreasing, but the volume of data is increasing – either you take container based, rackspace or micro data centre. We see that there is a vast scope for micro data centres in Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities.

5. How is the growth of cloud business impacting Raritan?

Cloud, which is nothing but a data centre in a public space, is increasingly being used by business organisations across industry verticals. Most of the companies with in-house data centres are shifting a part of their data centre into public data centre space and cloud is one of them. This has driven us to market our solutions to public players along with private customers, thus making cloud also our customer. As a cloud service provider, one needs to optimize the operational expenses to ensure services are more competitive in the market with earning more revenues from the existing services. This is where Raritan specialises in and delivers solutions that bring about utmost customer satisfaction.

6. What can organizations do to increase the efficiency of their data centre?

Raritan fundamentally provides tools for optimising efficiency in data centres. Our solutions are designed to help CIOs and data centre managers meet the growing needs of data expansion and cost optimisation. The reality is that every data centre has excess capacity in terms of space, power, cooling etc. The challenge is to accurately identify where and how much? Our solutions help identify these.

So, when the need comes for expansion, the DC manager can easily utilise existing infrastructure thereby reducing the capex and opex for the expansion project. The energy management solutions place an emphasis on reliable power distribution, power metering, and remote management. They help enterprises to manage existing power capacity better and save energy besides supporting in environmental monitoring.

7. What are the opportunities and adoption rate of data centres across industries?

Technological advancement in Indian enterprises due to increase in the adoption of mobility, big data and software designed networking, coupled with proliferation of the internet, business expansion and government’s focus on digitisation has led to the growing consumption and flow of data. India’s data centre market can be categorised into 4 buckets:

R&D labs: Most global IT organisations have very large data centres in the country due to availability of good technical resources. These are large and complex as the environment here caters to managing legacy, present and future systems. Some of the labs are Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Dell etc.

Government sector: The government has set up many data centres in states under the leadership of National Informatics Centre (NIC). In addition to the state data centre projects like the Aadhaar card also require huge data centres.

Private enterprise: Sectors like finance, telecom, manufacturing, etc, have their own data centres. IDC’s are also a part of this group as they also host a large number of private data centres.

SMB sector: Large computer rooms with 5-15 racks is another segment that is growing rapidly.