Datacentre consolidation and virtualisation, along with cloud and mobility, are the key trends influencing the enterprise infrastructure market. Som Satsangi, vice-president (sales), Enterprise Group, HP India, says that in the coming years, Indian enterprises will be building intelligent datacentres that focus on optimising existing hardware assets by adding additional software capabilities. “With our dedicated knowledge, experience, innovative technologies and advanced portfolio of datacentre solutions that only HP can bring to the table, we are ahead of the market in meeting CIO priorities in India,” he tells Sudhir Chowdhary in an interview. Excerpts:
What is the outlook for datacentre market for 2015 in India?
By 2015, the Indian datacentre infrastructure market will total $2.03 billion, a 5.4% increase from 2014 revenue of $1.92 billion. This will make India the second largest market for datacentre infrastructure within the Asia-Pacific region, and it will also be the second fastest growing market in Asia-Pacific in 2015.
In the coming years, Indian enterprises will be building intelligent datacentres that focus on optimising existing hardware assets by adding additional software capabilities. Several factors such as physical location, types of applications supported, power and cooling, downtime, floor area will help determine an organisations’ tech investment plan. The other aspect of the datacentre market that will see change—infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space, where both infrastructure and business models are flexible and are based on usage. This shift will reduce operating cost and increase utilisation of datacentre capacity.
Captive datacentres and third party hosted datacentres have seen growth in terms of IT spending and capacity utilisation. Captive datacentres currently have capacity utilisation of around 60-70%, which is estimated to increase to almost 80-90%, owing to an increase in service offerings.
At HP, we see profound changes in the competitive landscape and the disruptive forces are tough, real and accelerating. There has never been a more critical time to showcase our innovative technology in the datacentre infrastructure space. With our dedicated knowledge, experience, innovative technologies and advanced portfolio of Data Centre solutions that only HP can bring to the table, we are ahead of the market in meeting CIO priorities in India.
What are some of the trends and challenges you see in datacentre infrastructure space in India?
Datacentre consolidation and virtualisation, along with cloud and mobility, are the key trends influencing the enterprise infrastructure market. All organisations and CIOs want to ‘do more with less’. This is among the bigger challenges that needs to be addressed. There is considerable need for consolidation of traditional infrastructure, which till recently was largely siloed.
Datacentre enhancements and refresh are a CIO’s everyday challenge. Virtualised server, storage and network pools which operate on a stand-alone model need to be converged and with this the software that operates these, also needs to be converged. This is what will drive the datacentre refresh space.
Traditionally big players in this space used three-level architecture to make a data centre network functional. HP on the other hand, has reduced the entire datacentre traffic to two-way architecture. HP was the first to introduce software defined networks (SDN) and created a fabric that drives the entire datacentre with minimum changes required to each pane. By employing a network management console: each port, each server, traffic between server to storage is better managed.
What are the key growth drivers that are affecting customers’ technology spends?
During the last two-three years, there has been an increase in demand of datacentres from IT and IT-enabled service companies in India. BFSI, manufacturing and relecos are the other businesses that are showing an increasing demand for datacentre solutions. Businesses are demanding more services, innovation, speed and flexibility from datacentres. There is an imminent need to find a way to meet IT demands of the business while providing the innovative services for company’s competitive advantage. Enterprises realise the benefits of adopting the new era of compute and this has an impact on their budgets. The benefits can be measured in terms of lower cost of IT service (cost optimised across components, systems, workloads, apps, operations and the datacentre; Faster time to IT service (service delivery in minutes rather than days or weeks) and greater value of IT service to the business (IT outcomes deliver measurable, positive business outcomes).
At HP, Converged Infrastructure sits at the heart of today’s most critical technology trends—it’s the foundation for cloud, software defined datacentres, Big Data and mobility. HP is the most innovative compute partner with the deepest commitment to the market, the broadest portfolio and unmatched systems management. Our global service and support capabilities together with the most engaged channel partner ecosystem, making us an obvious choice for customers. For example HP’s Converged Systems team, formed almost one year ago, is delivering a solid portfolio of industry-leading converged systems that is optimised for various workloads, from Big Data, to virtualisation, to cloud.
From enterprise and their CIO’s perspective, are you seeing or getting request for a particular kind of technology solution, which was not the case say few years ago?
Today’s CIOs are looking for a way to manage enormous amounts of data. They are on the constant look out for systems and applications that help them work smarter by analysing Big Data and making intelligent, informed decisions which keeping their costs to a minimum in the shortest transactional time possible. Further, enterprises are also turning to cloud to improve business agility, reduce expenses and accelerate business innovation. Cloud computing redefines the way business deploys and consumes IT assets and architects and manages datacentre networks.
Conventional hierarchical datacentre networks built to support traditional siloed IT architectures can’t meet the security, agility, and price/performance requirements of virtualised cloud-computing environments. Public cloud service providers and enterprises deploying private clouds must implement flatter, simpler data center networks to support the bandwidth-intensive, delay-sensitive server-to-server traffic flows that accompany cloud computing. Enterprises must also evolve and adopt new management systems and practices to administer and secure virtual resources and orchestrate on-demand services.
HP has proven to be a reliable, strong partner because we have a broader and a deeper portfolio than anyone else in the marketplace. HP integrates infrastructure, software and services into comprehensive solutions that deliver enormous value for clients and partners. This process of integration provides much needed simplicity, speed and lower TCO. HP does this by applying the concept of the New Style of IT with integrated offerings.