Datacenters: Looking Beyond the Horizon

Datacenter is a term which has off-late
become synonymous with the databank needs of any company; small,
medium or large. Backed by the tremendous growth in this sector
lately, at more than 30 percent on a YoY basis, this boom has
definitely augmented the scope for solution providers (SPs). Mostly,
datacenters follow the capex model and
lease out on an operational expenditure basis to clients. This gives
SPs, the opportunity to not only come up with solutions pertaining to
network integration and system integration, but also infrastructure
integration. The scope area for SPs also include datacenter
consulting services, design engineering and build consultancy,
management and supply and integration of products and solutions.
Besides, there is huge scope for SPs in datacenter management and
they can also look in the direction of managed hosted services and
cloud computing to expand their businesses. Though the conventional
datacenter
services space has a lot of players jostling for attention, an SP can
differentiate himself from this crowd by having managed services,
that deliver value for the customer and eases his IT operations and
management.

Here again the possible services are
boundless and innovation can result in revenue stream which were till
now unheard of. Moreover, with its
own datacenter, an SP can leverage the liberty of designing the
offerings, create various flavors in collaboration with different
applications and software, build the cloud in offering mode, deploy
the applications, build the fulfillment models, prepare the menu
card, and nurture the infrastructure.

WHERE THE OPPORTUNITIES LIE

There is a heap of enormous
opportunities today for SPs in the datacenter business. From an
end-to-end datacenter IT infrastructure play, SPs can address
requirement from cabling and networking to setting up the entire
datacenter. For example, Frontier Business Systems, as a System
Integrator, offers a broad range of project expertise. It specializes
in planning, designing, engineering, constructing and management of
datacenter solutions,
that integrate 'best-of-breed', critical infrastructure technologies.
The result is an always available, scalable, redundant,
fault-tolerant, manageable and maintainable datacenter environment.
Col (Retd) Balwinder Singh, Director, Targus Technologies said, “We
envision opportunities in terms of extending our services in the
hardware sector, providing server, storage, routing, switching to our
clients. Besides, other kind of services that we are asked to deal
with are infrastructure, integration services, maintenance and
consultancy. Like for example, we have looked after the requirements
of the multiple components of datacenters of MTS in Chennai and
Jaipur.”

“Building a datacenter requires a lot
of design and then implementation. Every OEM has specific products, but
integration of all these
pieces and creating a solution which will give high uptime,
cost-effectiveness, best RoI and greener solution is a very big
opportunity for us,” added Ganesh Mahabala, Senior VP, Valuepoint
Systems. Sanjiv Patki, Global VP-Managed
Services, Allied Digital Services, further pointed out, “With our
strength in virtualization, we bring to table the concept of green
initiatives for the datacenter. Hence, we see huge growth
opportunities in areas starting from designing the datacenter to
building it, managing the program of building datacenters, and
finally managing the operations.” Additionally, with several
organizations shifting their focus from expensive and complex
Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions to innovative and cost effective
ones, the scope for SPs has increased. This is because it requires
very little integration skills and is simple to configure and set up
in a customer's environment. While the expectations of the customers
towards DR solution have not changed over the years, the solutions have
changed remarkably. The
concept of 'DR on Demand' is slowly but surely making appearance.
This ensures that SPs can quickly and effectively configure a DR
solution for the customer.

Avinash Pitale, Co-Founder and Joint
MD, Omnitech InfoSolutions highlighted, “We believe this behavior
and decision making pattern would defiantly increase. Customers look
at cost saving and capable team managing their business data. As a
service provider, Omnitech offers common pool of executives serving
the end-customers and this further offers reduction of cost for the
end-customers. We shall see small and mid-level
business moving on this path in next 12 months.” Ravi Verdes, Founder
and Director,
Frontier Business Systems, is however of the view that technologies
like virtualization provide innovative and cost-effective DR
Solutions. It does not mean SPs require little integration skills; in
fact, integration skills are required more from the technology side.
Today, DR is more of a requirement than insurance. Lot of compliance
rules have also played a large role in getting a DR
built. Even if DR is built, the processes around the execution of
business continuity like
who, when on what scenarios is also a very big opportunity.
Integration, configuration and set up is one part, to automate, or to
create processes and systems ensure that business is as usual is also
very important.

GETTING INTO CONSULTANCIES

Today, companies that need high
availability or 24-hour services outsource their datacenter services.
And this gives SPs an
opportunity to get into consultancies for their end-customers as well.
SPs are working towards
creating satisfied customers by emphasizing pre-design and planning
services to provide the optimal solutions to meet their clients'
needs. Although, most of the end-customers are putting efforts in
building their own datacenters, outsourcing or co-location is one
option if any of these customers do not have enough space and
resources to build their own datacenters. Here, the opportunity for SPs
is to help
these customers in migration. And since high availability or 24-hour
services has become synonym with IT infrastructure, this throws open
a whole new basket of opportunities in terms of providing consultancy
to end-users to migrate their datacenters to high availability
datacenters.

KV Jagannath, CEO and MD, Choice
Solutions, asserted, “Whether you are building a new datacenter or
optimizing/relocating an existing for better performance, we can help
you with the assessment, design, and deployment (relocation) of any
and all aspects of the physical infrastructure — power, cooling,
cabling, fire prevention and suppression, racking, tiling, physical
security, environmental and air quality. Our certified
datacenter consultants help clients bring industry standards and best
practices into their datacenters and DR centers.” According to
Sujeet Narula, CEO of Associated Business Computers, SPs have to lead
with consultative sales to leverage disaster recovery and business
continuity opportunities. Datacenter services can be an entry ticket
to overall IT consultancy opportunity. Once you are responsible
for storing, managing and securing someone's data, the customers
also look up to you for consultancy in other aspects as well. It
definitely gives you an edge over others. Datacenter solutions starts
from consulting services in terms of facility and IT facility
consulting services include planning
and predesign, power and cooling system analysis, feasibility and
project cost budgeting, availability and risk assessment, technology
planning, business continuity and disaster recovery, energy usage and
energy efficiency assessment.

On the other hand IT consulting
services include virtualization assessment and consultancy, DR
assessment, optimization, consolidation evaluation and planning,
technology roadmap planning, switch, router and network security
planning, and storage and data protection planning. Here, SPs just
need to perform necessary modifications to
adjust to new way of operations and manage the change and, lastly,
implement powers saving ideas. This in itself has become a new growth
area. “Sai InfoSystem sees opportunities
for itself in the datacenter consultancy, as providing consultancy
for building datacenter is emerging as a big business opportunity. As
an IT and system integration company, we have been sort of giving
this service, so far, free of cost in terms of educating the customer
in order to get a deal. Maybe now, the time has come to start
charging for such services that could make a big impact to the
customer's future operations,” added Sunil Kakkad, CEO, Sai InfoSystem
India.

DEALING WITH THE ROADBLOCKS

Despite huge scope and endless
opportunities, development of datacenters in India faces a few major
obstacles including security concerns and data retention worries. The
biggest challenge is the concern about a lack of energy supplies in
the country. Even several tier-1 cities, such as Delhi, Mumbai and
Bengaluru, have experienced several power blackouts each year. This
can become a serious issue as datacenter energy requirements in India
continue to grow with the rapid implementation of highdensity
equipment. Pawan Khurana, CEO of QuantM Net
Technologies, explains, “Data growth is perhaps another datacenter
hardware infrastructure challenge for SPs. System performance,
scalability, network congestion and connectivity architecture are
also adding to it. Accurate modeling and quantification, implementing
energy-monitoring tools,
accelerating consolidation and virtualization projects are the
measures that QuantM adopts to eliminate these issues. QuantM
incorporates innovative datacenter designs and adopt the concept of
green IT and virtualization technologies to overcome these
challenges.”

Additionally, the end-to-end datacenter
business requires taking care of aspects like roofing, fire control
and similar civil work. Normally, a solution provider doesn't
provide civil work. The main domain of SPs in the datacenter business
is IT. Overcoming these challenges is a prerequisite to delivering
prompt service and ensuring client's satisfaction. Generally, SPs
deal with such challenges by outsourcing. The industry experts also
feel that most of the customers plan to build datacenters in
traditional ways and expect SP to
integrate the complete solutions including physical securities.
Customers also tend to decide on the datacenter site and then discuss
with SP to arrive at the solution. However, in practice, this should
work the other way around. Customers should consult with SPs before
deciding on the datacenter site. “We face challenges when it comes
to competition with the biggies like TCS, Wipro, HCL, and others.
These large SIs are directly coming into the picture and building the
datacenters. Even the customers feel comfortable working with big
names. The challenge is giving comfort level to the customers in
terms of what we can really do. But having said that, we are making our
presence felt in the
marketplace by working with some of the large enterprises as well,”
said Girish Madhavan, Director, Quadsel Systems.

Some of the other common challenges
include selection of right solution for a specific customer, as the
concept of 'One Size Fits all' is not true in this business;
convincing customer about the need to implement new initiatives;
moving customer from capex to opex model and the management of change
that is involved in this process; and application monitoring and
management. Meanwhile, SPs are tackling these challenges by building
a team of cross domain expertise which focuses on specific
technologies and also a team, which knits all these to a viable,
efficient overall solution. Their contracts with customers have
discreet
solutions and products which can be looked at as a part of end-
to-end datacenter. Private cloud is another strategy which mitigates
the challenge of customer's pain points.

MEETING THE CHALLENGING SLAs

The concept of SLAs is rather new in
the Indian context. Apparently, it is in its infancy in context of
datacenter services. Hence, it becomes difficult to agree on SLAs
with the customers. However, this is not a consistent behavior. There
are some IT matured customers where agreeing on SLA becomes very
easy. So, the challenge of setting up SLAs depends on the IT maturity
level of customers. And once the SLAs have been set up, meeting those
SLAs is really not a challenge. This is the reason why SPs have the
best practices, delivery frame work and ITIL/ITSM framework in place.
Besides, companies always seek high availability and quick
responsiveness for challenges like data protection and disaster
recovery. Entering an SLA is an easy game. All it takes is a couple
of meetings to fully understand the client's requirements and
further set up a SLA.

However, following the SLA is a
challenge as there is a penalty clause included in it. SPs like
Targus Technologies always ensure that timely
operation is undertaken. It has various software and highly-skilled
people to monitor the progression as per the SLA. There are MIS
reports (both weekly and monthly) that are regularly sent to its
clients to ensure that the challenging SLAs are met. Most of the SPs
also believe once there
is a state of art infrastructure in place and the necessary tools to
monitor and manage the infrastructure and its performance, defining
and delivering on SLAs is not at all a difficult task. This also
implies that the ability to be confident of committing and delivering
SLAs comes with its cost in infrastructure,
monitoring tools and well trained team of engineers managing the day
to day operations. Moreover, it is not sufficient for management to
establish SLAs and then communicate them to the team and the
stakeholders. The SLAs need to be negotiated in a collaborative way.
This builds understanding and interest in the system on the part of
all stakeholders. This understanding and interest, paired with the
team successfully meeting the performance goals, results in
establishing/increasing trust in the team, in context of the
datacenter services. Hence, it becomes difficult to agree on SLAs
with the customers. However, this is not a consistent behavior. There
are some IT matured customers whose agreeing on SLA becomes very
easy. So, the challenge of setting up SLAs depends on the IT maturity
level of customers. And once SLAs have been set up, meeting those SLAs
is really not a challenge. This is
the reason why SPs have the best practices, delivery frame work and
ITIL/ITSM framework in place.