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Automotive, large-scale manufacturing likely to be early DC adopters: Sterling and Wilson

More and more enterprises will encourage their employees for WFH (work from home). This will require better bandwidth connectivity for reduced latency

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Pradeep Chakraborty
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Sterling and Wilson offers hyperscale data centers – conventional brick-and-mortar offerings, modular room-in-room data center systems, and edge data centers – containerized data centers (CDCs).

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Here, Sudipta Sanyal, Design Head, Data Center Business, Sterling and Wilson Pvt Ltd, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: What are the emerging trends for datacenter infrastructure in 2020+?

Sudipta Sanyal: Data is being created every day. With the global pandemic, the data and data security has become ever so important. This has led to increase in data center space. As we look forward, the concept of what the data centers do and what they are tasked to accomplish will continue to evolve. A right data center solution is the one that helps the DC managers to get top information of their data center on multi-faceted dashboards prompting necessary actions to resolve issues.

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Emerging technologies such as Big Data, AI, ML and IoT will be key drivers in increasing demand for data storage system and hyper converged infrastructures. Eyeing the growth potential and the recent budget, Government might look at establishing specific data centre parks with prescribed power and water availability, tax incentives to attract foreign investment and accelerate growth. This may help in setting up campuses in class B and C cities.

5G roll out will accelerate the demand for edge computing. Automotive and large-scale manufacturing industries are expected to take the position of early adopters. Application of remote, secured, modular and micro data centers are a few of the emerging trends for data center infrastructure.

The major concern, however, is receipt of inadequate monitoring of third-party people accessing the devices and the digitized operations. This has to be addressed on a immediate basis. The data center facilities in the future are likely to grant access to a network resource only if it fulfills the specific criteria, including the time of the day, location, and so on.

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DQ: How are data center companies rebalancing the provision of DC services, colocation, and capacity management?

Sudipta Sanyal: Virtualization has enabled creation and deployment of applications faster and store data easier than ever in the past which has helped grow data exponentially. More the data gets generated, it is important to preserve and protect the data with backup and replication, driving the demand for storage. This results in serious challenges for IT departments, especially for those who want to consolidate IT infrastructure with cloud-based applications, virtualization, and file sharing.

In such a scenario, rebalancing is utmost important. Rebalancing of data centre companies are achieved by adopting strategies of capacity augmentation within the same space, performance enhancement i.e. data processing time can be reduced from hours to just minutes – thus, organizations need fewer servers, hard disk drives and fewer software licenses.

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Rebalancing continues with compatibility to create a truly unified storage environment, Easy usage to optimize virtual machines with just few clicks so we can deploy as many shares per minutes and not hours.

Reliability, looks for systems that have no single point of failure architecture, and data protection, looks to keep the applications online to improve recovery in the event of any problem. We are also managing capacity through adoption of hybrid and multi-clouds environment and through automatic orchestration between private and public cloud providers. All these need to pair with a meticulous study on the cost economics and financial viability of the strategies in consideration of the problem at hand to derive a winning solution.

DQ: Which sectors do you see the maximum demand coming from and why?

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Sudipta Sanyal: The maximum demand will come from the IT sectors, especially the hyperscaler and colocation providers, followed by BFSI sectors and government initiatives, like e-governance. Also, in telecom space, the adoption of 5G technology will accelerate demand for edge data centres. More and more industrial process will adopt IIoTs for automation through use of edge data centres.

Cloud-based reference architecture will accelerate faster adoption, shift towards digital marketing will lead towards generation of high data volume, new generation of application writing / agile and DevOps will also accelerate the adoption of cloud base platform offerings.

The government initiatives like increased digitalization in offering public services, e-governance, city surveillance, smart city project and National Supercomputing Mission in research institutes. Digitization in medical and healthcare sector will also add to the data center demand. Data re-repatriation, due to restriction in hosting PI data outside the country, will also fuel the local DC development/cloud demand.

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DQ: What are the DC infrastructure security solutions being offered by you? Are you doing remote management of data centers?

Sudipta Sanyal: We follow eight layers of security system starting perimeter wall, entrance gate, internal and external security, building area, data center infrastructure and server room. Apart from this we follow international guidelines on fire, safety, interior quality, and engineering design which provides safe environment for all stakeholders in the value delivery system.

On the remote management front, we do provide DCIM solution which can provide insights in data centre infrastructures to DC user. Our role is limited to create physical environment and handover to the client after installation and commissioning.

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DQ: How are CEOs looking at datacenters amid Covid-19?

Sudipta Sanyal: Data centers are expected to be the next real growth opportunity across country due to global pandemic. Lock-down has forced nation to accelerate the shift online, driving a massive spike in data needs. The current pandemic challenge is throwing the need for data centers to provide rapid, high-availability of data center services. This will enhance the speed of cloud adoption.

More and more enterprises will encourage their employees for WFH (work from home). This will require better bandwidth connectivity for reduced latency.

DQ: What are trends for data center infrastructure efficiency (DCIE) and power usage effectiveness (PUE) metrics?

Sudipta Sanyal: The ICT (Information and Communication Technology) sector including data centres generates up to 2% of the global CO2 emissions, a number on par to the aviation sector contribution. The energy consumption in the ICT sector has increased exponentially in the last few years, mainly due to technological advances such as the cloud computing and the rapid growth of the use of Internet services.

In general, the information technology (IT) sector nowadays consumes approximately 5% of the global electricity, and it is forecasted that the share will rise to 13% by 2030.

Real-time video streaming, online gaming as well as mobile devices already account for 60%. Of all data traffic, and it is predicted that this will rise to 80% by 2025. With the advancement in cooling technologies, water, and air management, the PUE, which is reciprocal of DCIE, has been on decline constantly for the few years current at the global avg. 1.64 and reducing further.

A few DCs operate at PUE at as close to 1.2. A lower PUE means the lower use of energy on physical infrastructures of the data centre. This reduction in PUE makes the industry and the environment more sustainable.

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