IoT to make data centers more complex, but interesting : Sanjay Motwani, Raritan

The Internet of Things (IoT)  , the concept of every device we own being interconnected via the Internet, continues to make great strides, and in the words of Gartner is “promising to transform the data center market.” If and when that transformation does take place, data centers will be faced with an overwhelming amount of data that will need to be synthesized, analyzed, and stored. As a data center operator, one may need to prepare for this shift sooner than expected.  Rashi Varshney of Express Computer spoke to Sanjay Motwani, Regional Director, APAC – Raritan Asia Pacific, to understand how IoT is disrupting data centers and what CIOs would be looking in next five years. Read more…

Edited Excerpts

How do you look at India Datacenter market today? What is Raritan’s focus in India?

Indian data center market has shown positive growth like other global data center markets. The market is going through a shift and can be broadly categorized into 4 buckets:
The first bucket includes the R&D labs, though often ignored, has the largest data centers in the country. For example, Cisco has data centers with 2000 – 5000 racks per data center while Microsoft, Intel and AMD also have similar large data centers. This segment of data center market is not growing in terms of size but is also growing in terms of complexities as the market is becoming dynamic and so is the lab environment in order to pace up with future technologies.

Second, is the government bucket which has been quite active recently. While the central government has set up a world class National Data Centre and the states have their state data centers and few are coming up.

The third bucket comprises of the enterprise private data centers which is now going through a shift. With the increasing adoption of cloud based technologies, data centers are going into cloud based structure. Thus, they are now evaluating how much data should they control directly and how much should they outsource to a third party.

The fourth bucket is the small data centers for the SMB space which has about 5 racks – 15 racks. This market is also growing because the dynamics of the marketplace is changing so rapidly. For example, today ecommerce is trying to gain dominance in the consumer behavior pattern. And then with IoT everything is slowly getting more connected. Eventually, businesses are trying to have more equipments in order to serve these equipments. However, Raritan’s major focus is on the first three segments in India.

What are the new technologies which will lead to innovation in data center market?

Data centers cannot grow on the basis of business needs unlike various segments. With increasing business needs, they first try to look at ways of optimizing the usage of the servers. That is where virtualization comes into play by using servers more efficiently. Companies are now trying to optimally use their air conditioning. For instance, in a data center with 5000 racks, at times only 2000 racks are active at given point of time while, the air conditioning is running to cater 5000 racks leading to wastage of cooling and inefficiency. Today people are looking at various ways of controlling cost. All new technologies are looking at ways to maximize efficiency in every aspect of a data center. Moreover, the other dominating trend is the explosion of Big Data which involves managing excessive data. With data coming into play, bandwidth becomes the issue in terms of uploading and downloading of the existing data. Therefore, all these technologies together will drive innovation in the market and compelling to look at maximizing the infrastructure usage.

How do you see role of IoT in Data centre space? How do you think IoT can disrupt data centre industry?

Disruption may not be the right term but IoT will change the way we work and manage things or perhaps the way we live. With IoT more and more devices are getting connected with the internet which in turn means more storage is happening at the backend and managing out of a server which will be housed in one data center.
In terms of disruption, IoT will disrupt human behavior and in terms of complexity it will add an additional layer of equipments with different kinds of needs to be managed within a data center. Real time servers will need a different bandwidth and speed as compared to servers with less bandwidth and real time for which variable speed allocations within a data center will be needed. In short, IoT is likely to become more complex and interesting going forward.

Today’s enterprise customers are interested to go with minimum capex/opex and maximum RoI, along with personalised experience? How can Raritan help in this direction?

Raritan makes life easier for CIOs and data center managers. For a complex data center, we provide tools to make that complexity simple and helps them solve complex puzzle. Through our solutions, we are saving the capex and opex of our customers by restructuring or optimally showing how the CIOs and data center managers can use their existing infrastructure. We provide cost effective and most efficient solutions for a data center environment. Eventually capex and opex come down with RoI maximized.

How do you see future of datacenter after 5 or 10 years?

Organisations have already started looking for colder places to set up their data center to reduce capex and opex by saving on the power cost. On the other hand, compact data centers will prevail. Besides, the number of data centers will however reduce as people will outsource more. These data centers will act as mega data centers with high end technology. Consolidation of data center is definitely going to the next big thing and with that consolidation, technology utilization or efficiency ratio will increase enormously.