The Hindu Business Line : ‘Green IT concept to spur growth of data centres’

Go Green
Lack of energy supplies is seen as the biggest challenge for the growth of data hosting services segment.
Green IT concept will help reduce the energy cost component of the company’s total IT budget.

L.N. Revathy

Coimbatore, Nov 23 While India has the potential to emerge as a hub for data centre hosting services for nearby markets, the biggest challenge at this juncture is the lack of energy supplies in the country.

Gartner recommends adoption of the Green IT concept and virtualisation technologies by Indian companies building data centres to tide over this issue.

The research firm foresees a spurt in data centre capacity in India. Gartner’s projections reveal that the total data centre capacity would reach 5.1 million square feet by 2012. The capacity is expected to double in the next two years with both — the captive and hosted data centres growing at comparable rates.

In the long term, India has the potential to become a hub for data centre hosting for nearby markets such as West Asia, East Africa and Southeast Asia. There is enough capacity and diversity of network connectivity to these regions to allow applications to be managed out of India.

“However, the country faces a few major obstacles in the development of data centres and these include security concerns and data retention worries. The biggest challenge is the lack of energy supplies in the country,” Mr Nareshchandra Singh, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner Inc said.

He said that several Tier I cities such as Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore experienced power blackouts every year and this could become a serious issue as data centre energy requirements would continue to grow with the rapid implementation of high-density equipment.

The findings also revealed a significant increase in storage demand, growing from one petabyte in 2001 to more than 34 petabytes by 2007, increasing the data centre uptake in companies.

The growth in storage demand has resulted in existing data centre capacities being fully utilised. Consequently, there appears to be a need for building more such capacities.

The growth is expected to be driven by increased domestic requirements from sectors such as financial institutions, telecom operators, manufacturing and services. While large financial institutions and telecom companies could look at building data centres for hosting their growing data storage needs, data centre hosting providers might look at investing significantly to strengthen their capacities to meet the demand from the small and medium size businesses.

“Investing in Green IT provides distinct benefits to companies. It not only enhances the company’s brand value as an ‘environment-friendly’ one, but also helps reduce the energy cost component of the total IT budget. Setting up energy-efficient data centres is therefore critical,” added Mr Singh.