Tata Communications bets big on its data center

Data centers are fast emerging as the biggest part of the IT infrastructure and players in the Data Center business are trying to differentiate themselves. Gone are the days when Data Center was seen as a ‘corner room' infrastructure- not any more- it is now seen as the heart of the digital infrastructure. Today the very architecture of the data center has changed and it is increasingly being built for superior grade performance.

It is in this context Dataquest spoke to C R Srinivasan, vice president, Global Product Management, Data Centre Services, Tata Communications, " Over the last 20 years, the dependency on Data Centers has increased to phenomenal levels. Today almost all the businesses has online business and it has spurred the growth of the data centers across the world. Today data centers are being built to tier specifications and redundancy is being built into it."

Cashing in on Growth

Clearly data centers are empowering the enterprises of all sizes and it is an extremely challenging market. Says Srinivasan, "Our differentiator comes from our approach on all areas. Our facility is fully secure and provides domestic and international co-location, managed hosting and a range of value added services."

According to Srinivasan, any decision pertaining to zeroing on a data center from a CIO perspective involves careful due diligence. "CIOs need to be extra careful when choosing a data center and must opt in for facilities that offer the best fitment. For instance, our approach is highly verticalized and we had built the data center as per the unique requirements of the verticals. For instance, a BFSI client requirement is somewhat different form that of a retail client. So we study all these unique requirements offer a comprehensive portfolio of services."

As we look at the market evolution at this point in time, experts say that the data center market is posed for aggressive growth. Take the case of a report done by TechNavio report on the data center services market in India. The report says that the market here in India is expected to grow at about 21.6% between over the period of 2010-2014. The report also suggests the data center services market in India has also been witnessing inclination towards green data center equipment. However, the increasing need for expertise to manage the data centers could pose a challenge to the growth of this market.

According to experts like Srinivasan he says, " Today, many organisations are opting to outsource their data centre requirements to third party vendors because it enables scalability and flexibility instantaneously. The fact that "pay-per-use' models allow many businesses to scale up and scale down depending on business requirements is a huge plus in today's uncertain economic times. "

The Tata Communications data center is a million sq. feet of data center space, spread across the globe, understand the imperatives behind running such an operations. Company sources say that 90% of the materials installed in the Chennai data center project have been manufactured and extracted locally in order to decrease our carbon footprint.