Data centers, DR, and private clouds now ‘on-demand’

P Sridhar Reddy, CMD, CtrlS interview with

“Information Week”

Source: Information Week

Want a data center? A company is now offering it ‘on

demand’ and claims you can have it in a few weeks. It

claims you can save significantly with their on-demand

private cloud and on-demand DR site; resources can be self-

provisioned much faster

Planning to set up your data center?

The experts will tell you that it’s a bad idea to set it up in the midst of an industrialized zone, near the sea, or in a low lying area. And in a congested city where real-estate is a premium you will be better off outsourcing your data center. With many businesses growing at a clip of 30 to 40 percent a year, scaling up IT infrastructure to keep pace with business needs will also be a challenge as space is a constraint. And of course, a poorly designed data center results in inadequate power and cooling.

P Sridhar Reddy, CMD, CtrlS spends most of his time talking with enterprise customers to understand their pain points and challenges. He says most customers have space constraints or lack adequate power. “In many cases the customer wants to go in for a high density data center with blades, but their facilities cannot provide adequate cooling for this.”

He says many customers, especially in Mumbai, have their data centers set up in low lying areas;

some of these are major data center installations. Many of these are close to the sea or almost at sea level. So these get water logged during the monsoon. The salt content in the sea breeze leads to corrosion of electronic components. In industrial areas, this corrosion is caused by the sulphur content in the air.

“Because of this, many companies had either relocated or shut down these data centers in the last two to three years. This is a costly decision as it involves huge CAPEX, migration risks and support level decisions,” says Sridhar.

Learning from the mistakes of others, companies today chose to host their servers and IT infrastructure in carefully planned data centers such as those built by companies like CtrlS and Sify (to name a few). In fact some Telcos also offer data center hosting services.

CtrlS for instance, has just set up a 210,000 square feet data center in Mahape, Navi Mumbai. The state-of-the-art data center has Tier IV architecture, 30 megawatts of power, with standby power of 16 megawatts. It has a certified PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) rating of 1.42. CtrlS has another data center in Hyderabad.

“An organization can build its own data center within ours, and this is a model followed worldwide. We configure the data center according to their specifications and offer security as per their requirements. We call this the DC-ready model,” informed Sridhar.

An organization attempting to set up its own data center on premise has to go through the long and tedious routine of acquiring real-estate, installing air-conditioning, sourcing multiple phases of power, obtaining permissions etc.

“It can take several months (or years) to set up a standalone data center. But in the DC-ready model we can offer it in a few weeks,” said Sridhar. “The major benefits are that it is tailor-made for them. Also, the cost of running a data center over a period of 10 years is 30 – 40 percent lower.”

CtrlS is also offering a completely outsourced data center to small and medium businesses. This includes hardware, software, connectivity and services. He explains that SMBs have different requirements from large enterprises. “They are concerned about the total cost of ownership (TCO) and in infrastructure maintenance.”

Cloud on Demand

While most companies prefer a private cloud, there are concerns about upfront investments. To address this CtrlS offers a service called On-demand private cloud. This can be set up either on the customer’s premises or in the CtrlS data center.

Explaining this model Sridhar said, “In this model there is no upfront investment. We can provide the physical hardware in a matter of hours. Otherwise, the infrastructure scales up automatically on demand. With on-demand private cloud we can offer additional resources, through self-provisioning, within 30 minutes.”

While the On-demand private cloud may seem attractive to SMBs, Sridhar said he receives enquiries from even large enterprises. On-demand DR is another service that CtrlS offers. And Sridhar claims it can cut down the cost of running a DR site by almost 60 percent.

“Typically a DR site is idle 90 percent of the time, and on standby to be used in the event of a disaster. Yet all organizations need it. We offer a similar framework as private cloud for our On-demand DR site,” informed Sridhar.

Explaining this model he says an organization can use, and pay for 20 – 30 percent of DR resources. A “small fee” goes towards DR drills conducted by CtrlS during the year.“In the event of a disaster we provide additional resources on demand in 30 minutes,” claimed Sridhar.

Sharing his plans Sridhar says he wants to scale up to 20,000 racks in the next two years and 5,000 racks by March 2012. The company (part of the Rs 750 crore Pioneer Group), is growing at almost 100 percent every year.

CtrlS Mumbai FacilityThe State-of-the-art infrastructure