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DATA CENTERS: Panacea For Internet Ailments

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DQI Bureau
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0" src="../images/Na2.jpg" align="left" hspace="5" vspace="5" alt=""As businesses become more data-centric, the availability of data will become more mission-critical. It would then be imperative that the data is handled by specialists." Sivakumar Ramamurthy, Director, Intel India Technology Center" width="62" height="96">Content

and hosting are two key parameters that make the difference between success and

failure of a site. While network architecture and the global traffic flow has

reduced the facilities of a traditional ISP to merely an ‘edge’ for hosting

players, the core is served by the server farm or data center.

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With ebusiness gaining ground,

hosting and maintaining a site has become the key concern. It has brought in a

paradigm shift in the outsourcing requirements of content providers. These are

different from the services provided by a typical ISP. A single facility is just

not suitable for both hosting and connectivity most of the time. This is more

evident in India as the internet spreads further and bandwidth capacities of the

core grow by orders of magnitude in the next six to nine months. One needs

specialized facilities like data centers for all backend operations like

designing, hosting, security, interconnectivity and bandwidth.

Spread across an area of

approximately 20,000sq ft, a data center is typically a server farm that

requires $10-20 million as investment. It provides its customers hosting and

co-location services and round-the-clock technical support. It guarantees a

secure, reliable connection with improved bandwidth and acts like a hub

interconnecting major ISPs in the region of its location.

Datacenters in India

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India too has its share of data

centers. Many are coming up with minimum basic infrastructure to support new

applications. Some of the leading names setting up data centers in India include

Intel, Global Electronic Commerce (GEC), iAsiaWorks and Enron India.

The importance of a data center

comes from the fact that the internet is more than just about browsing. It is

more about ebusiness today. According to Sivakumar Ramamurthy, Director, Intel

India Technology Center, data centers will play a crucial role in the growth and

maturity of the internet economy. "As businesses become more data-centric,

the availability of data will become more mission-critical. It would then be

imperative that the data is handled by specialists and this will be done via

data centers," says Ramamurthy.Intel has a two-pronged strategy

for setting up its own data center in India. First, it is in discussion with a

number of companies across India for hosting their websites and ecommerce

transactions from its large data centers in the US. Second, it plans to set up a

local data center in India that would help contain the traffic that emerges from

India and goes to Indian sites, thus improving response times from those sites.

Similar are the plans of US-based

iAsiaWorks, which runs 15 data centers in Silicon Valley, California. iAsiaWorks

has among its clientele BPL and DBS Internet. It hosts

and manages their sites located at its data center in the US. Presently it is

scouting for a partner to set up data centers in India. Talking about the need

of a data center by an ISP, Sanjay Dani, VP, Hosting Division, iAsiaWorks,

explains, "Ecommerce brought a paradigm shift in internet hosting from that

of shared servers to dedicated ones. Today we have ‘beyond-brochure’ sites

which require dedicated servers and lots of database applications."

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Kumar Chakravarthy, Director,

Marketing, GEC, has a similar belief. He says, "Over the last six months

there has been a massive shift with more and more dynamic sites coming up. Since

they are dynamic in nature, there are issues of support, updation and

integration. In this case it is useful that the site is hosted in an Indian data

center."

The concept of data centers is

truer for a country like India than for any other if ecommerce has to become a

reality. The marketplace here is much more complex, with such barriers to doing

business as infrastructure, culture, language, regulations and currency. Even

more significant is the latency issue like transmission delays that can

interfere with conducting business online. Says Sanjay Bhatnagar, CEO, Enron

South Asia, "Till the time the latency factor is reduced within the country

ecommerce will remain a distant dream."

Therefore, a data center required

to offer a portfolio of India-specific services–translation,

project-management, and cultural and regulatory consulting–to enable MNCs ‘port’

their businesses seamlessly with Indian markets and vice versa.Net ailments and antidotesFor a data center to be

successful, availability of the bandwidth and local content is a key issue.

While bandwidth still remains a premium commodity, most of the Indian content

besides being in English continues to reside on servers based in the US. Though

operators like GEC are setting up their own gateways, how effective it would be

is yet be seen. Says Sanjay Dani, "Access to international bandwidth is the

key issue in India for successfully running the data center applications. Though

private gateways are now being allowed, the structure



remains the same as the cable landing rights to Indian shores are still with
only one operator–VSNL."

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Till the time content is brought

back to India one cannot expect internet traffic to flow in here. And the

question of requiring such specialized centers to manage content does not arise.

"As many as 90% of Indian websites are hosted in the US today. India’s

share of ecommerce will continue to be minuscule till the time we do not have

our websites hosted in India," says Sanjay Bhatnagar.

Data centers can bring to India

an opportunity to earn revenue from ecommerce transactions. Given the fact that

Asian ecommerce will grow from, according to IDC, $720 million today to $32

billion by 2003 and India being a reservoir of 50 million English-speaking

people, data centers can actually enable India to become the Asian hub for

ecommerce transactions. But Bhatnagar warns that Singapore is trying hard to

become the ecommerce hub for Asia. He says, "India can challenge that only

if it creates valid infrastructure within the country." Such encouragement

and initiatives from the government to reduce bandwidth bottlenecks is absent.

And India might lose the opportunity to become the key player in hosting and

ecommerce in Asia.

Puneet

Kumar



in New Delhi

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