It is the right time to invest in India

A recent study by the US EPA (Environment Protection Agency) shows that there
are more than 15 mn servers deployed in the world. These servers are spread
across various departments, which means that 80% of the IT infrastructure sits
idle at any given point of time. Though the IT infrastructure is blamed for
contributing to the carbon footprint, the same can be utilized efficiently to
bring down the carbon footprint and help save money.

Kieran Taylor, senior director, Akamai Technologies, explains how the cloud
allows sharing of IT infrastructure and reduces carbon footprint of IT. Excerpts

What prompted Akamai to go with the Indian expansion plan during this
downtime?

The latest Akamai State of the Internet Report has brought out some
interesting facts about India and the Internet usage in particular. We have seen
a 43% growth in the number of IP addresses registered during 2008-09 compared to
the previous year. So, that represents the number of citizens coming online.

However, unfortunately, there is limited capacity as average connection speed
in India is 772 Kb/sec. That ranks India 115th in the average connection speed.
The US is number seventeen with a connection speed of 3.9 Mb/sec and South Korea
tops the chart with 15 Mb/ sec. The average connection speed around the world is
1.5 Mb/sec.

Kieran Taylor, senior director, Akamai Technologies

So it makes sense to invest in India at this right time to bridge the gap
between demand and speed.

How exactly is Akamai planning the expansion?

Akamai solutions is to bring the content closer to the users. Akamai has
installed about 45,000 servers in seventy countries across more than 1,100
networks. Our Indian business in particular has witnessed an impressive ten-fold
growth since 2005.

Today, our India center handles all departments starting from marketing to
research and development with 350-plus headcount.

During 2009, we will be expanding our server deployment into different
networks in India so that people get better connection speeds and more reliable
connections to websites.

What is Akamais strategy toward cloud initiatives?

We at Akamai see cloud computing in three layersinfrastructure as a
service, platform as a service and SaaS, and we have solutions for all these.

The infrastructure as a service is sought for simple storage services or data
center services. The platform as a service, which is represented by computing
services like Amazon EC 2 etc, helps companies in basic application processing
on our platform to reduce the number of application servers and server license
that is needed in a data center. This kind of service is more sought after by
online commerce companies.

With regard to SaaS, we are seeing a great demand from SaaS companies who
want pay-as-you-go or utility-based models. A lot of companies come to Akamai
for this type of solutions.



How vital is the role played by shared platforms in reducing infrastructure
at data centers?

What we see in data centers today is nothing but duplication of a number of
application servers to handle certain crowd that comes to the website. At web
front end, enterprises are spending a lot of money on web servers, load
balancers, firewalls, SSL accelerators among others.

So much has to be spent to handle that peak demand which happens
occasionally. But, it is inefficient to over-provision hardware for websites.
There is a better way where you can share platform with other enterprises and
drastically reduce the infrastructure in a data center.

How can Akamai help companies achieve their sustainability goals?

We think the future of sustainable computing depends on a model where a platform
can be shared among a number of companies and reduce the infrastructure needs.
We are seeing shared platforms at all the three levels of the cloud computing
stack.

Sharath Kumar/CIOL

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in