Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Data centres offer chances, but also pose a challenge

CHENNAI: With terabytes of data sprouting everywhere, the question of where to store them poses a challenge.

For India, this presents an opportunity. The total data centre capacity in India is expected to reach 5.1 million square feet by 2012, says Rakesh Kumar, vice-president at Gartner Research, who specialises in large-scale enterprise computing strategies. In the long term, India has the potential to become a hub for data centre hosting for nearby markets such as the Middle East, East Africa and Southeast Asia.

K. Ananth Krishnan, Chief Technology Officer, TCS, agrees: “India is a good destination for ‘Remote Infrastructure Management’ (RIM). Much of infrastructure management can be off-shored, and India is well positioned to capture a good bit of this market. The NASSCOM-McKinsey study published in February this year also corroborates this.”

“We are not just seen as a cost-efficient destination but also as a value creator. The physical location of a data centre is a function of many enabling factors such as data security and privacy regulations, business continuity and costs. As the scale of usage of information technology in India increases across the enterprise and consumer worlds, we will certainly see a greater demand for data centres in India,” he says.

Mr. Kumar predicts that the scale of usage is bound to increase, especially with the rapid infrastructure development going on in the country. “Investments in the government, telecom and banking sectors are non-discretionary.” But more business also means more competition. “There will be a huge business pressure on local players to match international players who want to set up shop here.”

For local players, this lucrative future hinges on a dependent clause involving land, energy, security, and compliance. “Land prices are up,” says Mr. Kumar, which means input costs for setting up a data centre will go up.

Concern over data security is another issue, Mr. Kumar says. But Mr. Ananth Krishnan disagrees. “Security used to be a concern, but not now, with the maturing of technology.” Uninterrupted power supply is another pre-requisite for a data centre, which is a challenge in India. Electricity is needed not only to power up the data centres but also to combat the heat of the servers. “To provide greater computing power, the design philosophy has been to pack more servers into a smaller space,” Mr. Kumar says.

But the question of more power could have a greener answer. “Indian firms do not have legacy data centres,” says Mr. Kumar. So, there is a great opportunity to use alternative energy. Given the current trend, the future looks promising. “Indian companies have adopted the European view of balance and responsibility rather than the U.S. view of cost and profitability when it comes to the environment,” says Mr. Kumar. To sum up, there is an opportunity, but there are also challenges that need to be overcome.

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