CIOs and IT Managers have a significant opportunity to eliminate business
cost of downtime and expense caused by human error and datacenter oversizing.
This is possible through standardization on a modular architecture for the
network-critical physical infrastructure (NCPI).

Standardization eliminates the need for one-time engineering and eliminates
the overhead of dealing with unique problems in the infrastructure, freeing up
resources for developing the data processing functionality of the IT layer
supported by the infrastructure, which is the real mission of the data center.

The goal of NCPI standardization is to drive out the inefficiencies and
error-prone complexity of one-time unique engineering-to transparently manage
the routine business of IT physical infrastructure.

Move to standardization
Adopting modular standardization as a design strategy, for Datacenter
Physical Infrastructure, is beneficial on many fronts-such as reducing
unnecessary expense and avoiding downtime. Standardization and its close
relative, modularity, create wide-ranging benefits in datacenter infrastructure
that streamline and simplify every process from initial planning to daily
operation, with significant positive effects on availability.

Placing data
The growth of the datacenter market in India is attributed to the move
towards centralization and consolidation at the business process level, business
application level and the infrastructure level. Customers realize that a
diversified business needs to have its various units pulled together.

We
are also seeing applications getting centralized. Not too long ago, different
divisions of an organization would choose different ERP solutions because their
decisions were taken at different points in time or rolled out in a different
manner. Today, more and more organizations are realizing that if they can use a
single application, a single instance of an application or a common database,
they will maximize efficiencies and better satisfy the needs of their employees-or
customers.

The datacenter is the most obvious example of where we see the consolidation
of business processes, applications and infrastructure. And we are seeing this
not only in large enterprises, but increasingly in mid-sized businesses as well.
Unfortunately, in India, we do not have neutral data on the size of the
datacentre market. However, what we can do is make extrapolations based on the
limited data available.

India is one of the few countries in the world where adoption of Unix
operating systems-ideal platforms for the development of data centres-is
growing at over 20% annually.

The second indicator is that we are seeing strong growth of storage solutions
like Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS). The third
driver is the growth of enterprise management suites like HP OpenView.

What is clear is that Indian businesses are clearly embracing the concept of
datacentres as they seek to consolidate and centralize their operations in order
to gain that ever-elusive competitive advantage. There is no reason to believe
that this trend will slow down anytime soon.

With contribution from editorial advisors –Pankaj Sharma, country
general manager, APC India and Pallab Talukdar, director, Enterprise Marketing
& Alliance, CSG, HP India