Datacenter Availability

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