The demand for data centre has seen an upward thrust given the value of data realised by companies big and small.
The demand in the data centre can be segregated into two areas- first is the infrastructure consisting of racks, power, cooling and management and the second is the compute, network and virtualisation which is now converging and is known as Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI).
“On the infrastructure front, the data centres are becoming smaller in the enterprise and the mid-market segment. This in turn is leading to the growth of the micro data centres. This is because with technologies like HCI, the density has increased manifold thereby reducing the footprint of the data centres, secondly, the advent of the cloud means that the captive data centres will be fewer. Thus, we are seeing a surge in micro data centres as well as HCI in the data centre space,” informs Kota Subrahmanya, Director, Central Data Systems (CDS).
Incorporated in 2003, CDS, the Bangalore headquartered system integrator is a prominent IT infrastructure solutions that is attuned to the current and future requirements of businesses.
CDS provide services in areas including- setting up of physical infrastructure of DCs; configuration and installation of hyper-converged infrastructure; migration of physical to virtual (P to V) and virtual to virtual (V to V) workloads on the data centres; setting up of private and hybrid cloud; software defined networking (SDN); and DCIM ( Data Centre Infrastructure Management).
For data centre solutions, CDS work with Dell-EMC, Cisco, Nutanix, VM Ware and Schneider.
The company has been catering to customers across verticals. “We have seen that BFSI is an aggressive user of DC, IT/ITES also uses huge amount of data centre resources, manufacturing, retail and e-commerce. IT/ITES and e-commerce have been early adopters of Software Defined Data Centres,” says Subrahmanya.
Catering to Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) requirements
The first step towards SSDC is virtualisation. The next logical step is the seamless extension of virtualisation to storage and network services. Finally, when automated, policy-based provisioning and management is configured, the full potential of a SDDC is realised for maximum business benefit. Hence solutions catering to the SDDC requirements have sprung into significant prominence.
CDS has built skillsets in the domain of HCI and virtualisation (network virtualisation as well as storage and server virtualisation). “Hybrid cloud and also skills on Azure and Nutanix, form some of the capabilities which we have acquired to address the SDDC Space. Another area we have specialised is Cisco ACI (application centric infrastructure), we have seen some early success in this area as well,” claims Subrahmanya.
The data centre solutions of CDS are uniquely positioned to match each customer’s need. “Our strategy revolves around addressing customer business needs and the expectations they have from their investment in the DC. Customer is at the centre of all we do in the data centre space,” adds Subrahmanya.
The way forward..
CDS is adopting best practices for securing cloud-based applications the customers and protecting the DCs from ransomware and DDoS attacks. “We have seen that security works at all levels in an enterprise, however specifically in the data centre, we work with vendors such as Akamai in the cloud application security space and are currently building our skills on this platform,” informs Subrahmanya.
“We see that the data centre will become highly dense and with a huge cloud footprint, therefore we will be adding skills in the hybrid and private cloud space. To support the infrastructure, we are working with Schneider to offer DCIM remotely,” concludes Subrahmanya.