Changing DC Dynamics

— Kamal Nath

India has come a long way in its telecom journey. In the late1990s and at the dawn of the internet era, dialups and fixed lines were being used in a highly regulated telecom market with few players and little local content. VSATs made up for the lack of enterprise networks, mostly for two-way data transfer and realtime application access. However, these technologies were not adequate to meet the enterprise demand fully. The opening of the telecom industry to private players marked the first inflection point. The next decade saw the rise of mobile internet users and opening of the market with content players beginning to set up their network nodes in India.

In those early years, the data center (DC) market evolved largely as an extension of the telecom service providers offering data centers—at the points of presence (POP) or cable landing sites of the telcos. Enterprise customers were focused on building their private data centers in a captive environment, as the IT workloads were largely static and data center investments were seen in the same category as real estate, for most customers.

The last 4–5 years have seen the emergence of the following technologies in the telecom domain:

• 3G, 4G technologies facilitating a massive explosion in

• Massive multimedia, OTT, and live content technologies

• Cloud technologies enabling faster go-to-market,

• Network transformation tools like software defined wide area network (SD-WAN) enabling the network to be intelligently and centrally controlled and programmed using software applications. This has resulted in enhancing agility and security in the cloud era, providing cost optimization by utilizing the full potential of network nodes, and giving wings to the network through detailed application and end-user visibility.

Globally, and in India, this technological shift in the last 4–5 years has altered the way data centers were seen and perceived as the nodal points of the network. Also, with these newer technologies getting adopted, there has been a significant increase in the power consumption by equipment housed in the data centers. This has fundamentally altered the data center architecture to a more power-based model. Global data center statistics show a 74% growth in power vs. 24% growth in space globally, to support the massive amounts of data being generated over the networks, indicating the powercentric nature of the data center.

This, in turn, has moved the model away from the traditional telecom players who were selling space alone, and their data centers were located at strategic network points of presence and cable landing sites, to more focused data center players who could scale to the new-age demands of the data center. This trend is best exemplified by the strategic sale of data center assets of most telecom providers globally as well as in India.

Today’s businesses are more distributed and mobile than ever, and companies are moving existing servers, building new data centers, clustering servers in geographically separate locations (geo-clustering), and moving workloads to cloud to provide high-performance, nonstop access to critical business applications and

information. This calls for a robust network as well as data center interconnects and cloud interconnects between these geo-clustered data centers and cloud.

The digitization of business models has also led to an emphasis on end-user experience as a key differentiator for many businesses. In the digital world, this end-user experience is largely driven by the integrated network and data center strategy, at an infrastructure level. Proximity to end users, availability and accessibility of multiple networks, and ability to interconnect to other players in the ecosystem are critical aspects of the data center strategy today, as they drive both user experience as well as the digital transformation strategies of many customers.

Data centers today do not operate in silos or in isolation as IT is no longer driven by a monolithic architecture. Multi-cloud hybrid IT is the norm. Enterprise IT has also to work in conjunction with partner ecosystems such as payment gateways, APIs of other vendors, and SaaS applications. It is in this context that data centers are coming up in clusters of metro areas so that proximity to the ecosystem plays a key role in the overall landscape. In India, we have seen the data center market develop in Navi Mumbai, Noida, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Kolkata. Low latency for users and the ecosystem are part of the key technical metrics that drive this decision.

Data center interconnection is today more relevant than in the past, because of workloads getting distributed between data centers, private clouds and public clouds. A robust interconnection ensures that different levels of connectivity are available between two or more data

The development of a robust interconnection network portfolio also helps support the overall TCO of the data center offering. Globally, the data center interconnection market is growing at 14% as compared to the space and power market which is growing at 8%.This demonstrates the close synergy between the telecom network offerings and the data center market.

In India, due to the stringent regulation around telecommunications, the market is yet to transform completely. So while choosing the DC providers, CIOs should verify:

1. Availability of diverse telcos at a data center site.

2. Cross-connect policy, pricing, and lead times.

3. Overall direction of the data center provider and whether there a service provider lock-in or is the data center provider supportive and neutral in approach.

• Whether the data center provider is capable of