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It has been two decades since the field of information and communications technology started biting large chunks off the Indian economy. But the country is still deficient in storing and hosting all the information that it processes. Be it for hosting websites or enterprise information, the data centre capacity in India is far lower than that assimilated and processed.

A data centre is, usually, a cool room housing servers that stores and transmits information on websites and internal enterprise applications. These data centres can be captive, held by enterprises, or independent data centres (IDCs). Often captives become IDCs catering to other enterprises as well. Some IDCs lease their space to host service providers, who manage websites for a third party.

One such company in India is Sify, which opened its IDC in 2000, and now earns a fourth of its revenues from this section. “By tracking various nodes of information exchange within and between countries, we have calculated that 70 per cent of the web content accessed by Indian users are from foreign data centres, mainly in the US,” said PK Saji, senior vice president of global infrastructure operations, Sify Technologies.

Apart from content accessed from websites registered mainly in the US like Google or Yahoo, a number of Indian private companies also host their websites in the US, mainly for cost and convenience advantage.

“For banking and government websites, data centres have to be within the country as per regulations. But, for others, the US offers a vibrant hosting services industry where data centre space and application management services are available in flexible options like renting a server on per hour basis. In India, comparable services are provided by less than five companies,” said Verisign India vice president, Shekhar Kirani.

This, apart from increasing the download and upload speeds for users, who access international servers, also increases delivery costs for internet service who have to pay access charge at international nodes.

A few years ago, the data centre capacity was measured in terms of floor area in square feet, as individual server racks weren’t highly efficient. But, now, racks have high power density (6-12 kva per rack), and hence can store more information in lesser space. This is one reason why data centre costs have not decreased over the years, according to S Jayabalan, COO of Netmagic Solutions, a dedicated data centre provider.

Even though the power tariff in India (Rs 6 per unit) is comparable to the tariffs in the US (8 cents per unit), the unreliability of power supply means data centres have to invest on back up infrastructure like UPS and generators. “But, the actual difference in cost comes in bandwidth, which is priced at $150 per month per mbps in India, and $12 – 20 per month per mbps in the US. This is expected to improve with a 4 per cent capacity expansion of undersea cables in the pipeline for India in 18 months,” he added.

With the parliament tabulating a bill on data protection and government investing heavily in e-governance, Indian data centre providers are optimistic. “With more stringent data protection laws, we can expect that Indian companies will prefer to host their sites within India, and captive data centres may shift to dedicated service providers for better security. Demand can drive growth for us,” Saji said.

Netmagic, too, sees potential in government projects as Jayabalan puts it, “About 20 per cent of the growth of data centre business is expected to come from the government. But, for that the government will have to do something about the power scenario.”

Microsoft and Google have been mulling data centres in India to service the Asia-Pacific region. “India is well positioned in the global information map, and has favourable regulations compared to say, the Middle East,” Saji said.

“It is well connected by undersea cables compared to interior countries like Korea,” Jayabalan said, “Potential is tremendous.”

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Autor(en)/Author(s): Niranjana Ramesh

Quelle/Source: mydigitalfc, 18.11.2009

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