Tackling India’s growing Data Consumption with Cloud data-centers
Would you share with us the investment that Web Werks is planning to make towards market expansion over next two-three years and foray into Indian market?
Web Werks Data Centers have been leaders in India for the past two decades and are located in more than 3 countries with more than six geographically located data centers, offering Reliable hosting services on Dedicated Servers, Cloud, Virtualization, Co-location, and Disaster Recovery Services along with 24×7 Rapid Action Support and 99.995% Uptime Guarantee. With a robust, reliable and resilient infrastructure Cloudscene's H1, 2019 Data Center Ecosystem Leaderboard confirmed Web Werks on the 5th rank as colocation provider in Asia and the 1st rank in India due to its combined score of network density & connectivity service providers, while also securing colocation contracts with some of the world’s most important & influential internet companies.
Web Werks plans to expand to all metro cities and fiber landing locations – 10MW Bangalore, 10MW Chennai, Hyderabad, 20MW in Mumbai for hyperscale play and a 2MW in Kolkata for serving the east. Web Werks will be making investing over the life of the above projects to build the DCs; apart from real estate costs
Please share with us the future trends in data centers and how data centers will play a key role in smart cities of future?
The Data Center industry continues to grow and change at a significant pace because of the accelerating demands of big cloud operators for more data center capacity, Governments pushing for data residency, an increase in drive towards Edge Data Center deployments – to put compute and content closer to the eyeballs, high connectivity and data consumption driving demand for large network nodes and core Data Centers, and the need for computing and storage with regards to AI, Big data, analytics, IOT and ML which further accelerates the demand for Data Centers.Certain future trends include an immersive cooling tech as a reliable and low-cost solution to the otherwise conventional air cooling. Also, with companies increasing efforts to decrease power consumption, carbon emissions, and sustain operational efficiency, Green datacentres with green power as well as energy from bloom energy i.e. natural gas and trigeneration technology is now gaining prominence.
In case of Smart Cities, there are 2 types of DCs – the core and the edge. Edge data centers play a crucial role and lay a strong foundation for Smart Cities. Smart Cities use Smart Transportation, Smart Buildings, Smart Security, Smart Schools, Smart Grid and E-Governance among many other applications. All this requires the use of IoT and Big Data that sits physically in and uses the compute in a local edge DC. Moreover, the DC provides 24x7 reliability and availability to the applications. Furthermore, being closer to the audience and high capacity connectivity in the DC supports all the smart initiatives in the Smart City. It can be said that for all the “Smart” decisions, algorithms are taken in the DC, based on the data and analytics also stored in the DC.
In a recent announcement, Web Werks announced partnership with Plesk to offer fully integrated hosting services across India. Would you share with us how intense and growing is the integrated hosting market in India? What prospects do you see for it in the coming years?
Plesk is a leading WebOps hosting platform to run, automate and grow applications, websites and hosting businesses. As customers migrate to off-premises onto commercial Data Centers as well as cloud offerings, the growth rate of cloud itself shows the intensity & speed at which the hosting market is growing in India. Many large cloud providers as well Data Centre operators are encashing this opportunity. Further, the data required for these customers as well analytics, applications, business intelligence, data warehousing, disaster recovery, business continuity needs is only set to grow. Identifying this potential in the coming years, we decided to capitalize on the opportunity. With this partnership, Web Werks will offer its customers Plesk powered hosting services in the most profitable and easily accessible manner. Furthermore, Plesk brings in the latest tech like Kubernets & Dockers containers for customers to run their new & diverse applications within cloud & DCs ensuring that clients have the best leverage to business efficiency and can address all concerns regarding their Data Center needs with unprecedented ease.
As a global market trend more international players are coming into India. What is the reason that you feel behind this trend and how that impact the investments into the sector?
India is an Under-served market. With the growth of cloud adoption, the Data Center consumption is booming. The global revenue forecast is estimated to increase by 35% in 2020. APAC will be the largest beneficiary as internet penetration continues to increase, especially in India. India is contributing an increasing global share of data generation with stats at 3.6% of the global share in 2014, estimated to grow to 6% by 2020. DC operators are prioritizing India as an underserved high growth market.
What major challenges do you face while operating in the Indian market? What methods of mitigation do you adopt to curb these challenges?
5 components are extremely critical in the making of Data Centers. They include:
Real estate –Land and building that houses servers and storage, along with all the supporting redundant infrastructure. It has to be strategically located in a pollution-free clean zone for both land and air.
Power – Clean uninterrupted power to drive computes.
Cooling – required to cool compute’s and storage so as to keep it operational
Manpower – trained staff to manage power and support applications
Connectivity – telecom connectivity providing high-speed fiber capacity to support data movement in and out of the DC.
In India due to lack of space, DCs are clustered in metros near landing stations. Other major challenges include skilled manpower, power, fiber, clean land zones, proximity to customer locations. Web Werks team of experienced site selection experts locate ideal land passes for mitigating the above risks. This is further vetted through multiple agencies to make sure that little or no surprises exist during the execution of projects.
Do you contribute or work with State Governments or Government of India in their pet projects as Smart cities or Digital India? Please elaborate?
Yes, Web Werks is part of the MeghRaj cloud initiative and one of the 1st few players to be empaneled by Government of India to provide Cloud & Data Center services for smart cities & the digital India push. Web Werks actively supports the State government department of Maharashtra, Haryana, as well as central government departments across the country. Being an Indian company, Web Werks is promoting ‘Made in India’ initiative by indigenously building cloud technologies & DCs using best of breed international knowhow and partnerships.
Why do you feel that the Indian market is a lucrative market for data center and cloud services in the coming days?
The India data center market is likely to grow during the period 2018−2024. The growing penetration of the internet, smartphones, social media, and digital payment services is expected to increase the demand for cloud services in India. The Data Protection Bill (2018) is likely to prompt cloud service providers to store their personal data within the country. The Government Cloud Initiative (MeghRaj) will increase cloud-based service offerings of government agencies. The need for computing and storage with regards to AI, Big data, analytics, IoT and ML, further accelerates the demand for data centers.
