How to plan a multi-layered approach?

Consumers these days are getting connected at a much faster pace through multiple devices. The demand for smartphones, machines, and appliances are increasing, leading to a significant amplification in the amount of data traffic from these devices.

Data means anything from text, audio, video, that is generated through a lot of activities that take place in sectors like education, entertainment, personal services, medical, automotive, etc. All this data going from various devices into the internet is collected in the data center, resulting in expanding size of the data center (DC). So, a data center that used to be on a single server earlier, now consists of multiple server to store the data securely. There has also risen a need to optimize the traffic, security, and a lot more.

The DC which was initially simple with just 2 devices, is now a combination of many devices which are used to store, control, optimize, and maintain security. The nature of DCs is presently bigger, diverse, and flatter with more devices.

"Data center optimization will only increase, as more and more managers expect more from less. Security threats poses catastrophic risks. End users are demanding feature-rich content and continuous uptime. At the center of it all, power-hungry data centers are consuming more energy as data-intensive applications are pushing past network and storage capacity boundaries. This increases the need for data center optimization," says G Dharanibalan, executive, offerings management and development, global technology services, IBM, ISA.

The Need

Data center traffic was traditionally vertical-heavy traffic from the end-users desktop and access points to the core and back. With the shift towards cloud computing in the recent years, the traffic is slowly shifting more towards east-west horizontal traffic in which the servers communicate to transmit information from various hosted services in the cloud.

Data center infrastructure needs to be optimized to handle an increasing horizontal traffic within it. In addition, the network needs to be optimized to handle various applications as well as needs and demands of the organisation. Hence the trending topic are Software Defined Network and Application Driven Network.

Another trend is virtualization of network infrastructure to simplify the data center architecture, increasing its resiliency and availability by reducing complexity and downtime caused by human-error during configuration and maintenance.

"As the market becomes more aware of the importance of virtualization at network infrastructure level, it would grow interest in Virtualization in the data center infrastructure, as well as Software Defined Network (SDN). This would be central to the design of the data center network," points out Roy Wakim, director, Avaya Networking APAC.

Owing to growth trajectories in the market, Indian organizations are placing significant importance to their IT infrastructure, including data centers. The shrinking IT budgets and thrust on greener IT solutions means the effective and optimal use of data centers.

In this space, the Indian data center managers are also becoming increasingly concerned about the kind of facilities that they should incorporate in their infrastructure, such as power, cooling, and space.

Additionally, they are concerned about implementing disaster recovery (DR). The reasons for the same being, cost optimization and business continuity. Therefore in order to meet green IT directives, organizations are also employing various strategies like server virtualization and data-de-duplication in their data centers. In addition to containing costs through increased IT efficiency, organizations are also implementing a variety of technology approaches-from virtualization and storage management to high availability tools to make better use of and maximize existing hardware resources.

ER Ashok Kumar, VP services, Cisco India & Saarc says, "Optimizing the data center for cost and efficiency has become a key area of concern for companies. The increased focus on data center efficiency, agility, reliability and, cost optimization in India has led to a few interesting changes. For example, a virtualization-led consolidation strategy seems to be the common trend across most data centers in India, which would lead to moderate capacity growth."

Lastly, intelligent infrastructure management is another trend seen amongst organizations. This helps companies to shift their IT focus from maintaining disparate devices in data centers to directing a single landscape of servers (both physical and virtual) and storage. This also ensures better maintenance at lesser cost and with fewer complexities.

Growth

According to Gartner, the data center collocation and hosting market in India was at `2,925 crore ($609.1 mn) in 2012. The market is expected to experience consistent growth through 2016 when the market is forecast to total `6,240 crore ($1.3bn). Indian data center capacity is poised to touch 6.6 mn sq ft by 2016, with service providers driving majority of the growth.

Enterprises today, irrespective of their size, have a need for a data center. The size of the data center might be small, but it does not change the fact that they want to own one. India remains as a preferred location for DCs and has witnessed a growth in demand, owing to various advantages, like cost benefits and sustainability of operations.

Given this market opportunity, IT companies are looking at high demand for their data center optimization services. Further, practical and effective ways to optimize and manage an energy-efficient data center helps bring in a difference to the customers.

Amit Luthra, national manager, storage and networking solutions, Dell India says, "Our approach focuses on driving efficiency across platforms including servers, storage, and networks by delivering business-ready configurations for virtualization, power optimization and, scaling which has been well received by our customers."

According to Guruswamy Ganesh, VP and country manager, Freescale Semiconductor India, as the concept of cloud and virtualization is being increasingly accepted in India, it will certainly push the success of the data center optimization market in the country.

A virtualization-led consolidation strategy is being adopted in most of the data centers in India to enhance growth capacity. Server and storage virtualization can be used to improve utilization of existing hardware, thereby removing the need to buy additional resources. Of course, because virtualization introduces complexity into the IT infrastructure, organizations looking to fully realize the benefits of this technology while driving down capital costs are advised to also implement a management framework that provides architectural flexibility and supports multiple virtualization platforms as well as physical environments.

At the business level, virtualizing data center resources with Dell solutions is a technological advancement that enables a tactical approach to reducing equipment costs, increasing value and providing better system availability to users.

Luthra feels, "Today large enterprises have moved beyond complexities of data center usage as data centers have entered a more mass arena. Most organizations irrespective of their size has a need for an effective data center, hence the opportunity to grow in this segment is tremendous. We would expect the growth to continue as this is also coupled with a rising domestic demand for IT services where internet and mobile communication penetration is still moderate."

KP Unnikrishnan, APAC marketing director, Brocade Communications says, "The data center is arguably the most active and critical segment of today's IT environment in terms of innovation, strategy, and, investment. In particular, it is integral to key initiatives such as the migration of legacy IT infrastructures and architectures to a more flexible, agile cloud model in its various forms-including public, private, and hybrid clouds. One of the key factors driving organizations to migrate to these new, more agile IT architectures is the need to better address the complexities associated with the widespread and accelerating adoption of server virtualization."

Conclusion

The talk about Software Defined Network (SDN) is trending and it is still evolving. Some big early adopters have deployed in specific scenarios but there is still no clear consensus for the enterprises on what SDN will ultimately bring.

"There is a broad expectation of SDN being able to deliver network agility and to support cloud based resource sharing initiatives. All in all, an enterprise-class solution would deliver automation to bring integration, which would bring agility that finally would reflect business advantages. And in the mean time, we'll see SDN being refined as technology advances and more solutions appear," concludes Wakim.