As centralized repositories, either physical or virtual, for storage, management, and dissemination of data pertaining to business, a datacentre lies at the heart of most organizations and their working. Employees, partners and customers rely on data and resources in the datacenter to effectively create, collaborate, and interact. Over the last decade, the rise of Internet and web-based technologies has resulted in a greater focus on data and availability of information at any place, anytime. Data generation in any business house at any given point of time is stellar. To manage this data and maintain uptime 24x7 is a very crucial task. As businesses have gone global, a need for uninterrupted support infrastructure has become critical and the concept of datacenters as well as network operations center have taken wind. This coupled with the cost of bandwidth, which has plummeted significantly, has dramatically fueled the growth of datacenters. Every enterprise today needs some semblance of IT infrastructure in place. Real-time access to data and communication is the lifeline of even the smallest brick-and-mortar organization, and basic IT infrastructure has now evolved into a mandatory business requirement. The premise that Internet datacenters can provide immense benefit to customers from virtually all industry verticals is now an established credo, making them a universally accepted business need.

Business opportunity
Given the above, datacenters are growing in numbers as well as complexity, thus providing a huge business opportunity for both the solutions providers as well as vendors playing in the arena. The growth of the datacenter market in India as well as across the globe is attributed to the move towards centralization and consolidation at the business process level, business application level and infrastructure level. Customers have realized that a diversified business has to have its various units pulled together. So organizations believe that if they can use a single application, a single instance of an application or a common database, they will be able to maximize efficiencies and better satisfy the needs of their employees or customers.

According to Prateek Garg, MD and CEO, Progressive Infotech, “Datacenter consulting appears to be another big piece of opportunity. Going forward, this could drive two opportunities in the future, one for remote monitoring and management for datacenter infrastructure and applications, as also hosting of these servers in third party datacenters.”

As regard the growth of datacenter business in India, there are broadly two different reasons that have contributed to it. First is the transfer of global or regional (like APAC region for example) datacenters of MNCs to India because of the cost arbitrage reasons (manpower costs or real estate costs etc) as India integrates with the global economy – part of the core IT infrastructure of MNCs are also shifting to India. Secondly, the adaptation of information technology – such ERP implementation is making Indian IT infrastructure grow big enough to move to a datacenter setup.
Banking automation, new technology driven services like telecom are also driving some big datacenters being established in India. Opportunities for system integrators lie in the collocation of server, apart from shared server space, and disaster recovery/backup solutions. Local system integration firms primarily come into the picture at the design/planning stage of any IT infrastructure.

“To a SI or solution provider the datacenter as a business provides direct access to the core of the customers IT set up and that can open up opportunities of true partnership with the customer, rather than being just a supplier or a vendor. This partnership can bring value to the customer in terms of quality and cost of service as well as increased revenue opportunity for the solution provider thus driving a win-win situation,” says Satyen Vyas, Director and CEO, Vitage Group.

The other reason for the boom in datacenter business is the need for better infrastructure especially with regard to disaster recovery solutions.” Either because organizations want to expand their current infrastructure or because they want to reduce uptime of their existing infrastructure, they are looking for service providers like us. Such recent developments have also given rise to third party vendor management of these setups, “ says Simon Robin, National Sales Manager, Sify.

In essence therefore, consolidation seems to be the biggest driver for the datacenter business globally. Also increased computing power and the need for better accessibility of secure data across various locations has prompted the need for efficient datacenter management. IMS appears to be one factor, which, coupled with adequate connectivity infrastructure and availability of skills acts as catalysts for furthering the growth of datacenters.
According to experts this business will see a rapid growth in next three years and may surpass the growth rate of the traditional services like software development and so on. The rapid growth of economy is driving the need of IT infrastructure growth and that of business critical applications.

The integration to global economy is driving the need for 24x7 business availability as a base requirement. This will continue to drive the growth of NOC and datacenter business over the next decade. Undoubtedly, therefore datacenter businesses would grow in the years to come. As far as India is concerned this would be driven by the fact that Indian enterprises and their employees have started impersonating the western culture of working from remote locations and even from home. Datacenters will begin play an increasingly important role in the such processes where accessing information anytime will become critical.

Challenges of setting up
IT organizations today are working to improve operational efficiency, optimize utilization of datacenter resources, and look for a resilient infrastructure that consistently protects diverse applications and services against disruptions. The ultimate goal for a datacenter manager is to ensure an agile infrastructure that can incorporate ongoing improvements in computer, storage, networking and application technologies, while empowering IT to support changing business processes.

	“Datacenter consulting appears to be a big piece of opportunity. Going forward, this could drive two opportunities in the future, one for remote monitoring and management for datacenter infrastructure and applications, as also hosting of these servers in third party datacenters.”
Prateek Garg MD and CEO, Progressive Infotech
	“To a SI or solution provider the datacenter as a business provides direct access to the core of the customers IT set up and that can open up opportunities of true partnership with the customer, rather than being just a supplier or a vendor.”
Satyen Vyas Director and CEO, Vitage Group
	“With high density of data that requires to be managed, adequate supply of power along with the required amount of cooling is a key challenge for setting up datacenters”
Prabodh Tagare Marketing Manager, APC
	“We use NOC to provide T1/T2/T3 levels of services. We also provide Remote Monitoring Services using home grown tools like OmniMonitor, OmniAudit and OmniManageIT or industry standardtools as per customer's requirements.”
Atul Hemani Chairman and MD, Omnitech InfoSolutions
	“Our commitment to industry standards and the fact that our datacenters are open to multiple applications and can work on various operating systems ensures that our customers get a choice and flexibility to deploy relevant applications.”
Pallab Talukdar Director – Enterprise Marketing and Alliances, HP India

The scalability planning and ongoing technology changes have been the real concerns while setting up datace­ntres. The biggest challenge while establishing a datacenter is that this is a highly capital intensive business. Making a good headway in datacenter domain is not everybody's cup of tea since the entry barriers in terms of investment are of highest order. According to Karan Kriplani, Senior Manager – Marketing, NetMagic Solutions, “The biggest challenge that most companies face with their captive or enterprise datacenters is maintaining the skilled staff and high infrastructure nee­ded for daily data­center operations. Maximizing uptime and performance while establishing sufficient redundancy and maintaining watertight security is an area of concern.”

Technology selection is also of paramount importance. The intended service offerings should dictate the technology required, and not vice versa. It is also a challenge to implement the requisite high levels of physical and electronic security for online customers. Another challenge is ensuring that there is absolutely zero technology obsolescence in the datacenter environment. “Data­centers need to invest significantly in provisioning best-of-breed technologies for their customers, and protect against the inevitable obsolescence as technology progresses,” indicates Kriplani while adding that this is one reason why even some of the largest enterprises in the world choose to host their mission-critical and sensitive data with established third party vendors. By doing so, he believes most security concerns can be met, since the latest technology and resources are already in place.

“With high density of data that requires to be managed, adequate supply of power along with the required amount of cooling is a key challenge,” says, Prabodh Tagare, Marketing Manager, APC.

Customers concern about data security is by far the biggest challenge that needs to addressed in this business and customers seem to be increasingly opting for third party management of their data. This is an extension of the basic outsourcing practice where many professional companies prefer to focus on their core business and outsource the non-core functions to the service provider. Remote datacenter management as against internal IT team not only improves speed and quality of service but it also reduces the cost of service as the same vendor also manages other customer's datacenter thus spreading the cost across customers.

Since infrastructure is a one-time investment while services are required on a continued basis, the challenge is to devise solutions around customer needs of database manageability, security and service.

Fortunately there are several technologies available today that can impact the efficiency and effectiveness of the datacenter as well as its availability and resiliency. Consolidation and virtualization technologies deployed in datacentre solutions enable IT organizations to turn computing and storage resources from monolithic systems into a 'service-centric' shared pool of resources with standardized components that can be dynamically aggregated, tiered, provisioned, and accessed through an intelligent network.

The rapid emergence of 1U and blade servers, combined with various standardizations help eliminate the need for one-time engineering and overhead of dealing with unique problems in the infrastructure thus reducing unnecessary expense and avoiding downtime.

Datacenter solutions - Provision and management
The availability of various technologies along with the growing business opportunity has made it possible for several players to take a plunge into the datacenter business and each one had evolved their own key strategy for managing the same. As customers, many enterprises seem to adopt third-party solutions for data management and other mission-critical IT.

Historically, banks and other financial institutions have always been hesitant to adopt third-party services for managing their data, largely due to the perceived threat to confidentiality. Today, however, well-known domestic and international players in the BFSI segment are looking for third party solutions for datacentre infrastructure and management since they get the benefit of state-of-the-art security, and world-class in-house skill sets to manage online applications. Customers also stand to benefit from extremely stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs).

Solution providers playing in the datacenter business arena have adopted various strategies for deployment and managements of the solutions they provide to the customer. According to Atul Hemani, Chairman and MD, Omnitech InfoSolutions Ltd, “We Offer technology services to our global customers. We use NOC to provide T1/T2/T3 levels of services. We also provide Remote Monitoring Services using home grown tools like OmniMonitor, OmniAudit and OmniManageIT or industry standard tools as per customer's requirements.”

Kriplani of NetMagic considers their model a-la-carte approach, where customers can choose from the various services on offer. “Additionally our customers benefit by outsourcing their requirements to us. Besides considerable reduction in capital expenditure, customers who host with NetMagic also realize a significant saving in their operational expenditure,” he added. NetMagic solutions also include one-stop service provisioning, secure and scalable solutions and services, access to best-of-breed technologies, skillets, and infrastructure, provisioning of redundancy in infrastructure and service provisioning, protection from obsolescence in technology, 24x7 monitoring, management, support and clearly defined service level guarantees.

Kolkata's Diamond Infotech provides two kinds of datacenter solutions. One where the customer wants to setup the datacenter in there own office and the other where the customer wants his server or other equipments to be installed at ISP datacenter. Diamond therefore provides for complete datacenter solutions with both hardware and software as an integrated package. According to Manoj Rathi, Director, Diamond Infotech, ”We are associated with vendors like APC and Reliance for solution delivery.” According to Rathi, when a customer invests more into a datacentre setup he prefers big players or MNCs to cater to his solutions. However, he feels that in the future the kind of service would matter more than the cost.
Solution providers apart, even vendors are looking to provide for the best of datacentre solutions so as to ensure that customers getting a lower TCO and greater resilience.

Commenting on the differentiating factors of their solution, Pallab Talukdar, Director – Enterprise Marketing and Alliances, HP, said, ”In perspective we offer the widest portfolio of building blocks for datacenters that encompass industry standard servers, storage facilities, bleed infrastructure and an open management facility to our customers. Our commitment to industry standards and the fact that our datacenters are open to multiple applications and can work on various operating systems ensures that our customers get a choice and flexibility to deploy relevant applications. “ Agreeing with him on the need for flexibility and lower costs, Tagare of APC opined that by working to provide integrated architectures, APC ensures that customers not only get cost benefits but also save on installation space required for datacentres.

As a company that is service driven and focused on data management, customers of Sify, Robin believes stand to gain in terms of application, security and connectivity at their datacentres. He feels that datacentre business in fact compliments a lot of other businesses that Sify does as well.
According to a write up in 'Voice&Data', the Cisco Data Center Network Architecture optimizes IT productivity and resource utilization by providing a platform for the secure deployment of a service oriented, on-demand model for compute, storage and network resources. It offers customers greater choice for scale-up and scale-out server, storage consolidation and virtu­alization strategies, resulting in lower capital costs and higher utilization. It allows reduced operations costs by streamlining management and providing pooled infrastructure resources to meet application needs.

The Cisco Data Center Network Architecture creates an environment to protect valuable applications, services, information and infrastructure. It helps to ensure regulatory compliance by providing a resilient network infrastructure that supports security, availability, performance and business continuance goals. By providing end-to-end segmentation across network, server and storage environments, together with application delivery optimization services, SLAs are improved at the same time that the benefits of consolidation are realized.

Additionally the Cisco Data Center Network Architecture includes a networked infrastructure with gigabit/10gigabit ethernet, infiniband and fiber channel switching on intelligent server farm, server fabric and storage networking platforms and DWDM, SONET and SDH optical transport platforms; interactive services encompassing storage fabric services, compute services, security services, and application delivery and integration services and management framework providing configuration, security, provisioning, change and fault management services.

Datacenters and managed services
Datacenters are becoming an integral part of the growing managed services business. IDC estimates that the datacenter market is slated to grow at a CAGR of 53 percent from Rs 164.1 crore in 2000-2001 to Rs 1,394 crore in 2006. The India market seems to differ from the other markets in terms of infrastructure and service adoption. From an infrastructure standpoint, the US still is the worldwide leader in connectivity as a result of the vast telecom legacy infrastructure. But in the last few years the bandwidth proliferation in India has seen quantum growth and this could easily change the scenario.

Significantly, the Indian datacenter industry offers some of the same advantages that the Indian software and ITeS industries offer to their overseas clients, such as an abundance of skilled labor, access to best of breed technology and infrastructure, an English speaking workforce, and of course, the labor arbitrage. The commercials for managed services and support are far lower here than they are in the West, making India a popular hosting destination for companies that cater to target audiences that might not even be geographically Asia-centric.

Experts believe that since the fallout from the dot.com bust of 2001 and after, there has been a great deal of consolidation within the data­center space not just in India, but internationally as well. It stands to reason that in the fallout of the dot.com 'bust', datacenters (both globally and domestically) without adaptive capabilities were unable to either restructure or realign their service and product offerings to adapt to modified market requirements. It's this shakedown in the market that has caused some of the erstwhile global heavyweights in the Indian datacenter market to shut shop.

According to Garg of Progressive Infotech, “Customers in India still believe in a 'hot-body' coming to support them as the labor costs are still affordable which is in stark contrast to developed economies like USA. However, going forward this will change as for a country of our size to provide consistent service 24x7 across all technologies and platforms this possibly will be the only cost effective model, which will be less people dependent. From the Indian context this opportunity is not huge today but is likely to become big.”

For Team Computers managed services implies providing onsite as well as offsite support to the customer. “In the US, partners who are working as managed service providers do remote management of customers data that involves desktop, servers and infrastructure supervision, which covers 80-85 percent of IT problems of an enterprise. Whereas, in India the scenarios are entirely poles apart and if not 100 percent approximately 90 percent of the IT issues are taken care of onsite only,” says Uttappa.

Competition and future scenario
With datacenters redefining their offerings, the future would all be about ensuring that datacentres are well placed to offer more than plain-vanilla hosting, and rudimentary infrastructure services, which have become something of a commodity in today's markets. Competition is bound to grow and solutions providers can always get an advantage of being there in terms of referrals, proven processes and practices and ready infrastructure, to capitalize and get the leading edge.

While managed service would grow, datacentre infrastructure provision will also become critical and players in the filed would have to ensure low TCO and greater efficiency to their customers.

As far as the Indian market is concerned most expert's feel that these components still needs to mature and grow. This means that while growth opportunities exist, not many players would join in. However, those who are in the space of datacentre business need to capitalize on the existing opportunity.

Subbalakshmi BM With inputs from Anjali Choudhary in Delhi, Nelson P Johny in Mumbai and Piyali Guha in Kolkata

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