The world’s largest technology company Hewlett-Packard (HP) is betting big on the India data centre story.
HP Critical Facilities Services , that caters to the data centres, says that it is increasingly witnessing data centre upgradation and augmentation projects from the Indian market, despite global economic downturn. The firm says the growth is coming from the banking financial services and insurance (BFSI), telecom and manufacturing space.
David Winn, managing principal, HP Critical Facilities Services, said, ?Clients in India are being conservative, watch the market before they spend. But data centre owners are now forced to expand because of the demand of information, high bandwidth applications and requirement to increase the ability to deliver. At the same time, they are constantly under pressure from the boards and investors not to overspend and yet deliver services.? He adds that, moving from a pure co-location business model to an IT services business model will be critical for third party data centre service providers as the market slows down.
According to research firm IDC, the overall India data centre services market crossed the $1 billion mark in 2007 and was expected to grow at a CAGR of 18% to touch $1.52 billion by end of 2009. Total cumulative data centre built-up area is likely to touch nearly 8.4 million sq. feet by end of 2009. Third party data centre services market slated to grow at 27% CAGR (2007-2012); to become a nearly $ 0.5 billion industry by 2012.
Abir Banerjee, country manager, data center services, technology service, HP India, says, ?We are increasingly witnessing large augmentation and upgradation projects in the financial services and telecom space as they have run out of space. Customers are looking at data centers that can fulfill their captive requirements as well as the hosting requirements. So enterprises with tier two or two plus data centers are upgrading to tier three or three plus and some are even looking at tier four.?
The Uptime Institute defines the tier requirements in a data centre. A tier three and four data centers would largely mean large uptime requirement, operational requirements and power requirements.
The enterprise data centre practice has been essentially in the BFSI space with the core banking projects. The BFSI sector is now witnessing the second phase of growth. The first was during 2000-05 when the sector saw building of data centers of 5000-10,000 sq. feet. ?The sector is now looking at 20,000-30,000 sq. feet of data centers because they have run out of space. So the challenge to design such a high rack density and high power per density data center increase manifolds,? adds Banerjee. The case is similar with the telecom and hosting facilities sector as the large telecos are increasingly witnessing growth in the subscriber base.
HP is also focusing on the manufacturing sector which is opening up in this space. ?Large manufacturers like Tata steel or Bajaj did not think of the data centers but now due to the ERP implementation they have realised the importance of consolidation and virtualisation and hence we have a strategy called data center transformation strategy by which we tend to help them.? Manufacturing sector is looking at data centers with 200-300 sq. feet of white space and hence they are outsourcing to third party data centre services that are 20,000-30,000 sq. feet.
HP says its services helps customers reduce costs, optimise efficiency, and get more out of their existing data centres without having to wait for a large budget approval. The design and structure for the data centres help clients migrate to multitude facilities and tier three or four data centres without disrupting the ongoing infrastructure.
