With the exponential growth of mission critical data, enterprise community is looking forward to high availability and at the same time, low latency. This is what next generation data center infrastructure is all about and players such as Netmagic and CtrlS are offering their data center services to better suit the changing business dynamics.
Speaking about the growth of data center business, Karan Kirpalani, Associate Vice President – Product Management, Netmagic says that India is growing fast on the data center business side.
“Today, we have 1200 active customers in India. These are some of the most technologically advanced and progressive organizations. We are involved in segments such as the online and ecommerce space, travel portals, manufacturing, banking, hospitality, healthcare, insurance etc. We have customers in all these segments today and the list is growing quite fast. We are serving these customers with the help of our eight data centers spread across Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Noida,” he explained.
According to Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Founder & CEO, CtrlS Datacenters, there has been a tremendous activity in this space in the last 5 years. “The 3rd party datacenters market is estimated to reach US$1.1 billion by 2015 (CAGR 29% 2010-15). BFSI, Manufacturing, Public Sector, Telecom, Retail and other verticals are the drivers of growth for third party data center infrastructure,” he explains.
This represents phenomenal growth given that the industry itself is nascent in India. The growth in datacenter business is getting a lot of fillip from the growing Managed Service Market, which is estimated at Rs. 500 Cr and is expected to reach Rs. 1000 Cr by 2015.
As Cloud adoption gains momentum, there will be further thrust in the usage of datacenter services. These would constitute the primary focus areas for datacenters in the Indian market.
Speaking about CtrlS offering, Sridhar Pinnapureddy says that the CtrlS cloud is one of a kind offering that no other provider currently offers – like business continuity, 3 copy or 4 copy depending on customer needs, Single SLA, complete automation. “We could go on and on, but the best evidence lies in the way our customers are reacting to the offering. We have a tremendous, almost 200% growth in the last 60 days alone. We see a lot of potential from the SME segment for our Managed Services and Cloud,” he adds on.
Talking about the importance of working with partner community, Karan Kirpalani from Netmaic says that synergizing with partners is very important today.
“We are a partner centric organisation and work with most of the large solution providers in India, we are working with companies such as Cognizant, Genpact, Accenture etc where we have tailored service offerings for our channel partners. We have a very robust hierarchy based reseller model which is actually being used by a few of our channel partners to create their offerings on the cloud, in a very automated and online manner. This is creating great opportunities for channel partners to venture into the cloud space and greatly benefit from it,” he adds on.
Addressing Enterprise Challenges
Enterprise CIOs often emphasize that data center migration is a complex process which becomes difficult to handle, so how are data center solution providers helping in this regard?
“Data migration is a huge problem. Our processes and the support that we are offering our customers in the process of migrating their data is our biggest strength. Our customers such as Axis Bank and L&T InfoTech have gone on record stating that the support offered by us in the data migration process was priceless,” informs, Sridhar Pinnapureddy from CtrlS.
Speaking on the company’s strategy to handle complex business scenarios and data migration, Karan Kirpalani from Netmaic, says, “We address the challenge of complexities with comprehensive approach. The process starts out with complete auditing of the customer’s infrastructure, leveraging our cloud offerings to create redundancies during migration phase. We also get completely involved in the physical migration of customer’s infra from one location to our data centers,” he explains.
Enabling Enterprise Transformation
With the introduction of cloud and virtualization, next generation ready data centers are fast becoming the biggest agent for change to enable business transformation for the enterprise today.
“Most datacenters are still coming to terms with cloud deployments. Innovations are slow to kick-off in our country. As far as CtrlS is concerned, we have been experimenting with providing cost and time intensive solutions at a fraction of the cost. There has been a lot of work on creating effective CDNs, more Zero Data Loss and BYOD implementations. Currently BYOD and Big Data deployments are the talking points,”
“We manage to create big differentiation from our competition both on the scale perspective as well as service perspective. This is because we are able to do more than just the data center aspect of things – we are able to do the network stack, the security stack, the DB stack, application stack etc. And on top of it all, we have got a great Infrastructure as a service offering. All this is putting us in a better position today. Currently we are 1200 customers, but we are looking at having 5000 customers soon,” explains, Karan Kirpalani from Netmagic.
Backup As a Service
With data centers going strength to strength, next generation concepts are now becoming a part of reality. And hence backup-as-a-service is being offered by a number of data center solution providers.
Talking about this, Huzefa Motiwala, Country Head Pre-Sales, Information Management, Symantec, says, “At Symantec, we believe that 2014 will be the year where ‘Software Defined Everything’ will be the key. With the explosion of Information, we believe that enterprises, including SMB’s, will begin to rely heavily on Datacenters. In line with the current needs of the market, Symantec has recently announced the latest versions of NetBackup (7.6) and Storage Foundation (6.1). Storage Foundation 6.1 enables data centers to leverage Solid State Drives (SSDs) in ways that allow customers to access mission critical data and applications 400 percent faster than traditional Storage Area Networks (SANs). Customers as a result are free to choose any storage infrastructure provider, and businesses can make critical decisions faster. Modern enterprise solutions must provide faster and automated application protection, give insight into large, complicated virtual environments and provide the foundation for partners and service providers to deliver backup-as-a-service, ” he explains.
