Data Center- 'The Indian market is not as advanced as Singapore, Malaysia'

Globally, what are the new trends impacting data centers today?

Simon Cowley: Globally, we see the trends relentlessly of higher speed. We have customers that are looking at 40G and 100G. There are also discussions of 400G bandwidth. There is more and more inclination towards fiber content than copper. In some geographies there are data centers with 100 percent fiber content. So this is one trend we expect to continue.

Another interesting global trend is the rise in modular data centers. It is similar to the concept of small pods which can be containerized. You can drive it to the location, plug it in and it will help to increase the data capacity of the network. Not sure how it is impacting India but it is gaining popularity in the US and Europe.

Can you elaborate more on the concept of 'Intelligent infrastructure' and its importance in data center management?

Simon Cowley: It means different things to different people. It means providing visibility all the way up to the physical layer. With the physical layer it's typically a bit of mystery to it. A large amount of time goes in understanding where the problem is occurring than actually solving the problem. With adding intelligence to the physical layer all the way up to the wall port or any port in the data center you can open that up and remove the mystery and expand the network administrator's control all the way up to the end point.

How does Commscope create a difference in this area?

Natarajan Viswanathan: Historically we are a company that listens very carefully to what the customer says and wants. For eg: we were in talks with a customer who did not see the value in intelligent infrastructure for his network. Simon walked him through a 10 minutes presentation and he admitted that he needed all the aspects that deploying an intelligent infrastructure can provide. What I am really saying is, the responsibility to a large extent is ours to educate the customers. This is the reason why we are doing this 6-city road tour. We want to meet a group of CIOs and CTOs to let them know that something like this exists. They don't need to get their blood pressures high in times of trouble.

We see our competition mainly steering the conversation towards pure vanilla solutions and that' where we differ from them.

How is the state of the Indian market different from other parts of the world?

Natarajan Viswanathan: Indian market is not as advanced as other markets like Singapore and Malaysia. The way they are building some huge data centers, they are telling us that you're cabling needs to give me 10Gtoday, 40Gin 5 years and 100G in 10 years. We don't want to see you people in here again. We go ahead and do that. I don't think we have reached that in India but we are having some very interesting discussions. I have always believed that the earlier doctors of technology are the trend setters and I think we are going to see things changing pretty quickly here.