By Sanjay Gupta
Certain things are true not only of business entities but technologies—or the facilities that house them—as well.
Data centres, those jumbled piles of servers, wires and networking gear one often sees whirring in some gasping-for-space rooms, are getting bigger and bolder than ever before.
Previously limited in their role as providing the means to run a few business applications and supporting the day-to-day networking needs of employees, data centres of late have been coming into their own as hubs that increasingly drive business. Be it the growing number of devices in the organisation, the rising terabytes of structured and unstructured data, and the faster crunching of multiple applications, data centres have the spotlight turned on them like never before.
The reason for this can be understood in terms of the growing risks and costs associated with data centre downtime. According to Emerson Network Power’s 2013 State of the Data Centre infographic, such costs have gone up 33% since 2011. Further, it says that the average cost of a complete data centre outage is $901,560, and businesses average one complete outage every year.
In India, too, with the growing reliance companies have on data centres for business operations, the costs and risks are sure to go up. All the same, CIOs and their lieutenants must make room for more racks and more application loads in their DCs in ever-shrinking time windows in order to support growth. All this while trying to keep energy costs in check and meeting the regulatory and compliance needs.
A couple of scenarios are emerging in this context. One, enterprises are consolidating and re-architecting their own data centres, using technologies such as virtualisation and DCIM (data centre infrastructure management); and two, farming out part or all of their IT infrastructure needs to independent data centres (IDCs) or cloud service providers (CSPs).
The first option takes their fight with server/storage sprawl to the next level, and is marred by challenges of attracting and retaining technical talent. The latter requires bolder (and sometimes riskier) thinking and new skill-sets on the part of the CIO and his (much leaner) team: defining and managing SLAs, monitoring the cloud service, optimising it, etc.
The second type of data centre activity is relatively new to India, which is witnessing some really big IDCs set up shop or expand presence (CtrlS, Tulip, Netmagic, to name a few).
While the wheel will keep turning for internal data centres for many more years, CIOs should brace themselves for more immediate action in hosting applications on the bigger, more efficient and (hopefully) more cost-effective facilities of third-party providers.
– Sanjay Gupta
Editor, Express Computer