CtrlS, India's first Tier IV Datacenter
By siliconindia   |   Friday, 08 July 2011, 19:48 IST
Printer Print Email Email
CtrlS, India's first Tier IV Datacenter
With over 20,000 racks planned across India, CtrlS is India's first Tier IV Datacenter and the preferred choice of corporate houses both large and small. SiliconIndia spoke to Sridhar Reddy, CEO of Ctrls. Sridhar is regarded as the thought leader in the datacenter industry and has changed the datacenter market landscape in India by building a datacenter which can guarantee the highest availability and least energy consumption. Q) How did CTRLS happen? Tell us a bit about the motivation for building Tier IV DCs? CtrlS didn't happen by accident. It is a result of deep understanding of the needs of the industry, telecom and physical infrastructure such as power, cooling and DC space. We spent over 15 years in this space. We have started one of the first ISPs in the country, we pioneered new technologies in the Internet industry, and we travelled all over the world, understood the best practices followed by leaders, and improved upon them. The idea of Tier IV came up while in discussions with customers. One of our first customers is interested in a facility that will never go down as they cannot have a DR site for this. They are setting up an international gateway and all the links will go down if something happens. Q) What benefits should potential customers pay attention to in an offsite DC? We have a banking customer who wants a similar facility even though they have a full DR site operational. They say it takes about three hours for their DR site to be ready in the event of a disaster. The loss per hour is more than a million dollars, not to mention the loss of reputation. They, therefore, don't mind paying a premium for a Tier IV DC, if it's available. Q) Tell us briefly about the differences between a Tier III and a Tier IV. The difference between a Tier III and Tier IV is same as the difference between a budget and a premium hotel. There's a difference in each and every element that goes into these categories right from land selection to building strength to fuel backups to the type of raised floor etc. There are hundreds of differences covering all aspects of the DC. The fundamental difference is of course a Tier III has a single system with built-in redundancies whereas a Tier IV has two systems with redundancies. For example let's take how a Tier IV is powered. It needs two live dedicated power sources from different stations. Where as a Tier III also needs two lines, but from a single substation. If something happens to that station or the cables are cut, there won't power in that DC for days together some. Q) Give us a list of the top benefits of outsourcing. Tell us how the perception among enterprises is shifting. What are the concerns? On Outsourcing: Total-cost-of-ownership-based savings, higher uptime, zero capex, access to better technical skills, superior bandwidth and savings on bandwidth, scalability, and peace of mind, so that the customer can focus on their business. On changing perceptions: A lot of companies, especially in the emerging-enterprise space, many progressive companies don't even plan for their own space for a DC today. In the next three years more than 70 percent of them will use hosted DCs. Large enterprises have a different set of challenges including legacy infrastructure. They have invested a huge sums in the last three years and find it extremely difficult to convince top management to outsource. Things have changed a lot and very quickly. Top concerns: The biggest is scalability among large enterprises, while connectivity is for emerging enterprises. The private cloud is the best answer for people with concerns on security since this is a dedicated setup. Some of our customers wanted more than this. We addressed those concerns by using a leading provider, RSA Technologies. Q) How does the CT RLS DC provide high availability and stay energy efficient? On high availability and green: This is a big challenge as most of the systems, such as the uninterrupted power supply systems, work at 40 percent capacity. We are very very lucky and our timing of setting these up is perfect. Today almost all our equipment works as efficiently as a fully loaded one. On safety and green: The bigger challenge was the safety and green combination. For example, using water brings in 30 percent efficiency in cooling systems, but sending water into a DC is unsafe. One leakage even in 10 years can cause irreparable damage. We did meet these kind of challenges by simple innovations and achieved the most energy efficient DC status.

Digital Supply Chain Transformation – Winning the AI/ML Way