By Ankesh Kumar, Director, Product Management (Channel, IT Solution) and Marketing, Emerson Network Power India
India?s telecommunications market is currently the second largest in the world and its growth curve has been impressive in recent years. In fact, a recent report released by the GSM Association (GSMA), in collaboration with the Boston Consulting Group, suggests that the mobile-savvy economy will contribute approximately $400 billion to India?s GDP. This, in conjunction with the increase in smartphone penetration in India and the proliferating base of internet users, has resulted in an increase in data generation, which has to be managed and arranged systematically by data centres. The rate at which data is being generated is going to increase over the years and thus telecom companies will have to make provisions for storing it in order to maintain a competitive edge. For most telcos, a new market for data centre infrastructure design options is surfacing in the wake of the increasing productisation occurring in their IT spaces.
Modular data centres and their relevance for telecom companies
The lines between the telecom and IT industries are blurring as data, video, voice and app-based services are being consumed on a regular basis on the same device. This has led to the rise of a new trend, wherein telecom players are increasingly looking at modular data centres. A modular data centre provides a cost- and energy-efficient data centre space with a rapid deployment time frame. Apart from speed of deployment, there are several other business cases for modular structures, including the need for reducing capex and ensuring a positive energy footprint. Modular data centres are now proving to be a viable proposition for virtually any industry, especially telecommunications, where speed of deployment is paramount.
Modular data centre: Smart Solutions and their importance
Modular data centres are flexible as they are fully customisable, freestanding facilities that leverage the efficiencies of integrated design and prefabrication. In order to keep IT infrastructure agile and running 24×7, companies will look at solutions that can maintain this kind of set-up in an organised and efficient manner. This is where Smart Solutions can play a huge role. These solutions are such that they can be assembled on site and are, therefore, categorised as on-premises physical infrastructure. In a traditional data centre set-up, balancing data centre best practices for capacity, space utilisation, availability and efficiency was difficult without making sacrifices. But today, as organisations have distinct operational and business objectives, network infrastructure demands too differ. Smart Solutions address all data centre management needs with rapidly deployable solutions that are not only cost-effective but also add data centre capacity without losing IT control and balance, the most common data centre objectives. These intelligent, integrated solutions have the industry?s leading power, cooling and management systems to optimise data centre efficiency in all IT environments of all sizes.
In addition, the design and agility of modular data centres helps minimise water and energy usage, as well as building costs, while increasing computing capacity, software capabilities and server utilisation. Many companies are gradually accepting the fact that energy-efficiency improvements are a sure-shot way to reduce oper-ational costs. With regard to the telecom firms, the modular data centre design enables them to gain a better handle on their bottom line by anticipating costs more accurately, thus reducing overheads for the capex required for building a data centre from scratch. This ultimately translates into lower costs for their customers during the roll-out of newer technologies like 4G and 5G, in an environment-friendly way, which is always good news for business bottom lines.
Conclusion
As we keep flying higher into ?the cloud?, it?s hard to completely understand what the future of data centres will look like. Having an option driven by modularity that will allow for consistency and scal-ability, is paramount to transitioning to these future requirements. The opportunities for the sector are dependent on how effectively the telecom vertical is able to transition to a new breed of data centres that are based on flexible and cost-effective designs.
As more customers seek technologies and solutions that allow for a reduced environmental impact, modular data centres will present an attractive solution to telecom companies. Modular data centres will play a huge role in this change and the widespread adoption of technologies will see the data centre community developing new technologies to handle the additional demands of data-hungry consumers. These fully customisable, freestanding facilities leverage the efficiencies of integrated design and prefabrication without limiting flexibility. It?s a dramatically different way to build a data centre ? faster and at lower costs than traditional construction practices. It is, therefore, no exaggeration to say that facility-scale prefabricated construction or modular designs are the most significant design innovation in the industry since the proliferation of data centres began some 20 years ago.
