Data Centre India 2019

The sixth edition of the international conference, Data Centre India 2019, was organized in New Delhi recently. The one-day conference enabled to understand and formulate strategies related to the future needs and challenges of the data center sector in the country. It was organized by Bharat Exhibitions.

The conference fostered a dynamic forum for the senior executives of leading enterprises to understand hyper-converged virtualized network functions and formulate strategies to enhance their data center infrastructure in line with business needs. It brought the best minds in the data center vertical under one roof to trace the importance of various aspects of building state-of-the-art data centers and hyper convergence of conventional enterprise data centers and virtual cloud-based data centers.

The event was sponsored by Oracle, Ixia, Telesoft Technologies, Savitri Telecom Services, Allied Telesis, and SIG Systems. It was supported by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY), and the knowledge partner was Broadband India Forum.

Industry Speaks

Neeta Verma
Director General, National Informatics Centre,
Ministry of Electronics & IT

“The three major requirements for a data center are land, power, and manpower. Today, most of the data centers in India are located in Tier-I cities, where the cost of land is the highest. The data center services companies should follow the example of a large number of PSUs, setting up data parks or data townships in Tier-II or Tier-III cities. In 1960s, many PSUs, like NTPC, NHPC, BHEL, SAIL, and many others, set up their manufacturing units, power plants, and steel plants in remote locations and along with that they set up entire townships to provide all facilities to their employees and their workforce, she added. According to her, this move can help the data center companies generate employment and create economic benefits for the local population. Today’s data centers are integrated and cloud-enabled. One of the panel discussions held at the event delved on the challenges being faced in this context, including the architecture, the technology, and the efficiency of operations.”

TV Ramachandran
President,
Broadband India Forum

“While the data center ecosystem in India has developed to some extent in the last 4–5 years, there is still potential for further growth of the sector. One also needs to take into account the economics of data centers and storage. Data centers consume huge capacities of power (a medium-sized data center consumes power almost to the tune of that consumed by a small city) and require vast tracts of land for operations. In order to facilitate this, it is imperative that the conditions for viability of setting up of data centers in the country are addressed on a high-priority basis. With the growing trend of video and audio-visual content consumption across the country, and especially in the rural areas the requirement of storage and transmission of this immense traffic growth necessitates the development of data centers to a considerable extent. We need to be well poised to accommodate this explosion of video traffic, alongside other social media services, which is imminent in the near future. Incentivizing of data centers instead of mandating them could prove beneficial for this purpose. There is an urgent need for a robust and secure digital infrastructure, which can deliver reliable and cost-effective solutions to the business to drive the digital transformation initiatives taken by the government.”

Vinit Goenka
Member Governing Council, CRIS,
Ministry of Railways

“Setting up of indigenous data centers in India will avoid data colonization and should be prioritized.”

Amit Goyal
Global Head Technology Practice,
Birlasoft

“The decision to switch to hybrid cloud is imperative for enterprises as it allows them to make the optimal use of on-premises infrastructure, while leveraging cloud for additional, burstable workloads. Future-ready enterprises are bolstering their transformation journey by adopting emerging technologies and platforms like Blockchain, AI, Chabots, DevOps, and others, in a hybrid cloud deployment model.”