“Data Centres-Another Growth Story”

The great communicator, US President Ronald Reagan once famously said that “Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire; it wafts across the electrified borders.” This huge quantum of information available through different means is at the heart of the expansion of data banks available to organizations, governments and the general public. So where does all this information or data get stored?

Data or information is stored in interlinked servers across the world, some in isolated locations and some in server farms or data centres. A data centre is thus used to house servers, computer systems and connected peripheral parts like telecommunications and storage systems. To support its working it is dependent on continuously available power supplies and data communication services.

With the ever increasing quantum of data and consequently data centres there has been an evolution of the data centre industry from a guideline perspective for housing data centres and the business perspective. From the guideline perspective the first major integrated standard guideline for the infrastructure of data centres was the “Telecommunications Industry Association’s” TIA / EIA 606-A “Administration Standard for Commercial Telecommunications Infrastructure” of May 2002. It was followed up by the TIA - 942 Telecommunications standards for Data Centres in April 2005. This was meant for use by Data centre designers in the building development process and covered the following:

• Site Space and Layout
• Cabling Infrastructure
• Tiered reliability
• Environmental Consideration

The tiered reliability mentioned above ranges from Tier 1, which allows upto 28.8 hours downtime annually to the most stringent Tier 4 allowing a downtime of only 15 Minutes annually.

From a business perspective the growth story in India has been quite bright. As per various studies made by the Gartner, IDC and Springboard research the growth till 2014-2015 seems set to be at a rate of upto 39% CAGR (Compounded Annual Growth Rate). Gartner has predicted that the total market capacity would see an increase from about 1.3 Million square feet of data centre space to about 5.1 million square feet in 2012. This figure did not include data centres in less than 1000 square feet area which were numerous as well.

IDC meanwhile predicted the size of the market as 10,000 crores by end of 2011 against a market valued at 6000 crores in 2009. It is further predicted that India has the potential to be the hub for markets in the Middle East, East Africa and Southeast Asia.

One driver for the growth of the third part data centre industry has been the deficiency of skilled manpower and technical skills within most organizations to manage captive data centres and the associated budget constraints. While there are drivers, there are challenges too.

The growth story is just beginning and evolving. It presents enormous opportunities in the IT / ITES space.