The existence of data centers in India can be traced back to over a decade back. The Indian datacenter market has traditionally been dominated by captive datacenters. Some of the third party datacenters were companies providing bandwidth. The Indian datacenter grew very slowly till 2004 due to the high cost of hosting which can be attributed to the expensive bandwidth. But with the bandwidth costs going down drastically, datacenters in India are poised for a giant leap. Conservative estimates suggest that the overall datacenter market is poised to grow annually by about 25-35 percent for the next 3-4 years. The following statistics would give us a more clear insight.

The datacenter industry is currently passing through an interesting phase where we can see a significant shift towards consolidation and implementation of technologies in datacenters. The emerging technology trends are:

* Green Datacenter
* Cloud Computing
* Nuclear Proof Datacenter
* Consolidation

As datacenters consume more and more power globally, the need of the hour is green data centers, which are extremely energy efficient and environment friendly. By strictly implementing green measures like virtualization, efficient floor layout, and green rated equipment, one can save almost 50-60 percent in energy bills. Nuclear proof datacenters have also become a reality where the whole data center is constructed in the form of underground bunkers, which can withstand a nuclear attack, thereby taking data security to new heights.

Companies in the past were concerned about outsourcing their datacenter because of concerns like security, availability, accountability, and Intellectual Property rights. Scarcity of quality datacenter space was also an issue. But this has changed with the provision of Tier-IV datacenter space in the country. And with the entry of focused datacenter companies in India, i.e. the Managed Service providers, the trend is quickly shifting to outsourcing of datacenters by various companies. These MSP’s not only address the security concerns of the companies, they also provide additional benefits like superior infrastructure, scalability, zero capex, expertise, and option to choose bandwidth providers that will not give them the highest availability but also lead to considerable amount of cost saving and help them to do what they are best at, i.e. focusing on their business, their core area of expertise.
IT professionals can look at datacenters as a career option very seriously. Datacenters, being an emerging industry, would not only give them a chance to work in a challenging environment but would also give them an option of choosing from over 17 specialized career options like database, networking, storage, and applications.

With the current slowdown in the Indian and global economy, companies are exploring various options to cut costs without compromising on the performance of their IT systems. We see slowdown as a catalyst for datacenter demand, because by hosting in specialized datacenters like CtrlS customers would get the twin benefit of cost saving and management of mission critical infrastructure by an expert.

The author P. Sridhar Reddy is the CMD of Ctrl S Datacenters.