GREEN IT CONCEPT TO SPUR GROWTH OF DATA CENTRES

L.N. Revathy, Coimbatore, November 24, 2008
The Hindu Business Line

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,” Naresh Chandra Singh, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner Inc said.