Kevin Hughes, Business Development Director, Cooling Line of Business – Asia Pacific and Japan, Schneider Electric IT Business, talks to Jasmine Desai about India’s market potential in cooling, the company’s strategy and how it is catering to the local and global requirements through its supply chain
Why do you think is the heat generated by data centers increasing constantly?
The server technology has changed over the years. The servers are getting more small and compact, with a major increase in compute power is increasing. Presently, there might be 5 kilowatts in one rack as opposed to 2 or 3 kilowatts. Technology has completely changed. Earlier, cooling used to be very uniform but cooling has had to keep pace with this change. So what is right today, may not be right in a year or two. There is increased usage of blade servers. They are great from efficiency standpoint, there is lot of compute power available, but it does create complications to power and cooling.
Do you think modular data centers will help alleviate cooling issues?
Most definitely yes. A modular approach is a great approach in quite a number of ways. There is no crystal ball to know the future of one’s data center. From cooling perspective, one can adjust the needs. There needs to be a vision of how systems work, where units are failing etc. Here, DCIM gives lot of meaning. Operational cost is very important. It does not make sense to have a large system that cannot anticipate loads. Storage needs are increasing which is creating more complications. Schneider definitely offers the whole product portfolio here. Schneider is made of five different business units. There is definitely a market for this and that is why we operate there and have an offering there.
What sort of data center architecture would you recommend for efficient energy management?
Energy management is a major focus these days for CIOs. It was a lot of talk over the years. With the energy cost rise, it would be foolish not to look at it. It is high on everybody’s list. The cost of energy is consistently growing. Energy efficiency and sustainability are the main factors affecting IT power and cooling market at the moment. Presently, Indian companies are taking sustainability seriously. From a design perspective for a data center, it has to be most flexible and efficient. The approach will be different depending on the location of the data center. For example, recommendations for south of India will be different from that of North of India. Many times architecture has to be mixed, thus there is no one set of recommendations. It is all highly individual depending on needs of the organization.
According to you, what are the trends in power and cooling in APJ vis-a-vis the global scenario?
Schneider has split four regions i.e. Americas, Middle East and Africa, Greater China and APJ. APJ has a whole is a mix of mature and immature countries. Energy here is not as stable as in Europe or North America. There is a trend of free cooling, but most of Asia is also near equator, so when talk about free cooling we have to have a very different approach as opposed to Europe or North America where the climate is really cold. So the challenges are really different and it in turn, brings about different approaches to the way we do business in APJ. Free cooling has been very slow to get adopted although it is a great measure to reduce energy costs. There are many ways to approach it. It is not really cheap. Schneider has some great innovations around free cooling. Its really economization. But the adoption is pretty slow.
There has been lot of talk around renewable energy. From engineering standpoint, it can be a very complex thing to harness renewable energy. With time, it certainly will happen but right now it is a concept waiting to be explored. It will start with large organizations where it makes sense from Capex perspective.
We looked at the trend in data centers and there is lot of talk going around cloud computing. Because of virtualization and cloud computing we see a steep increase in co-location. For SMBs the in-house data center market is shrinking because they prefer opting for co-location due to management and cost issues.
