Coimbatore enterprises open to try cloud services

During the Smart Infrastructure Forum in Coimbatore, NxtGen Data Center and Cloud Services justified through independent researches the growing demand from organizations in adopting cloud services. Piyush Savla, regionl head, NxtGen, quoted the Gartner study done in September 2013 about the adoption of private cloud. The study claims that 11% of organizations have no plans of implementing cloud services while 45% of organizations are plannng and 44% of them have already deployed.

Both NxtGen and its technology partner Emerson exhorted their solution partners to help customers choose from a combination of their Enterprise Cloud Services according to their own business requirements. Anshul Kumar, senior manager, Emerson spoke about Emerson's new SmartCabinet and SmartRow offerings and explained to partners on the usage of their products and their power efficiency values.

The business values from OPDC and Enterprise Cloud Services particularly for both large enterprises as well as SMBs were also emphasized during a panel discussion at the Coimbatore Smart attended by Satish Vishwanathan, head products, NxtGen, Arijit Dutta from Intel and Srikant JS from CRI Pumps.

Why are organizations in smaller cities still not going for data centers in large numbers? Srikant, who has already deployed a data center in Coimbatore, believes that many hesitate because of a lack of a proper location to set up a data center taking care of all components like power supply and redundancies. "Also most of them lack the acumen or skill sets to manage a data center. They need adequate expertise to identify what if anything goes wrong," he adds.

Dutta, however, contradicts Srikant that these should no more be challenges for organizations of any size or hue. "IT is no longer an EDP function (that can be pushed to the back room), but more a core engine that fuels your business growth." Since IT is now as much a function of business, he suggests three prescriptions for organizations that is essential for them in the new paradigm.

"One would be optimization of resources that would help increase your compute capability. While virtualization takes care of that, the second critical step would hinge around manageability. How much proactive management can be there from the CIOs side. Third and probably very critical is the security aspect of sensitive data." The imperative is for organizations to take care of these three issues and not harp back on challenges that have always stymied them traditionally.

Vishwanathan, on the other hand, feels that architecture is the most critical aspect to look at when you are setting up a data center. "I agree with Srikant that in most cases organizations have no luxury and architecture becomes the key fulcrum when designing data centers," he says.

On the issue of in-house vs outsourced data centers, Srikant advices for the latter. "I would call this hosted infrastructure rather than cloud. While in-house makes you feel more comfortable with secure data, you need more resources to run it that in turn increases not just your capex but also your opex. On the other hand, a hosted infrastructure automatically implies ‘pay for what you use' and that makes it a more viable and sensible option."

Dutta again presents a contrarian view. "Location of data center is incidental. Rather the focus should be on two critical parameters-data sensitivity and business criticality," he adds. Satish adds the last word in the discussion. " It is no more about whether to outsource but what to outsource."