Friday, January 30, 2009

DATA CENTRE GROWTH MAY SLOW

Bengaluru
The Asian Age

Research firm Gartner, in October 2008, had stated that data centre capacity in India would grow from 1.3 million sq ft. in 2007 to 5.1 million sq ft. by 2012, a 31 percent CAGR.

Although many IT vendors remain optimistic about the long-term, they do see a short-term spending blip on capacity expansion.

"New data centre build outs will be delayed, not stalled," HP India’s director of Industry Standard Servers Rajesh Dhar says.

Traditionally, the IT hardware sector in India has grown about three times the country’s GDP growth rate. With GDP growth now expected to moderate, the hardware industry should slow down as well.

However, there are multiple growth drivers for data centres over the next few years. Every Indian state, Dhar says, will need a data centre to house e-governance projects and telecom firms would have to invest in servers and storage for pushing value-added services.

Nevertheless, as of now, it is not clear whether telecom companies would scale existing data centres or build new ones.

During a slowdown when IT budgets are tight, enterprises, he says, may opt for "prolonging" the life of a data centre by investing in blade technologies, which saves on space and optimises power utilisation.

The view resonates in a new data centre report from security software firm Symantec as well, which concludes chief information officers now want to do more with less. To reduce expenses, Indian data centres may see more automation of processes, virtualisation and consolidation among others.

The report identifies right staffing data centres in India as a huge challenge — quality manpower in IT is more skewed towards services rather than hardware.

No doubt, about 75 percent of the survey’s respondents said their data centres were getting more complex to manage.

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