The Mid Year Perspective: India & The Rest of the World

By Nick Parfitt, Senior Global Research Analyst, DCD Group

Global Trends:

* Enormous growth in IP traffic from both humans and machines. A Cisco study stated that the increase in data is exponential and largely from the Internet of Things. This will lead us into the zettabyte era.

* Compacting computational footprint: far more can now be computed and stored in the same space. Great news in term of space requirements, but what about power densities, connectivity requirements and equipment. For example, just how big should future data centres be?

* Data centres are increasingly shared rather than in-house, virtual rather than physical. Our recent census shows that every year, the footprint the size of Germany plus France moves out of in-house servers.

* Cloud will take over the world – or rather, the parts of the world that it can. Our recent census indicates that cloud data centres be they self-build or co-located will assume the major role in IT storage and service delivery.

* Changes in technology responding to exponential demand. We now have hyperconvergence, dark fibre, silicon photonics, ever smaller form factors and a host of other developments that drives this trend.

India is subject to these global trends, but has the following:

* Higher rate of growth in data centre assets and investments than any other major market globally. No surprise here as we try to embrace the concept of a digital economy.

* A higher proportion of the investments goes into data centre build. Our recent census shows that a whopping 40% of the investment goes into build, most likely due to demand outstripping supply.

* Power issues! Pressure on our infrastructure as we try to cope with rising power costs and interruptions/black-outs. An interesting note here, that the need for adequate back-up has made India into the world’s second largest data centre generator set market.

* Data centres are now specializing to meet local requirements as the Indian market evolves. Our data indicates different markets in different parts of the country, even though increasingly they are all connected. For example, Bangalore is all about IT and Technology, Mumbai is the financial capital and so on.

* India is a net exporter of skills. We have now reached a point where training and education are of a quality that enables us to send out our people to the rest of the world. It is also helps that we have the world’s second largest population and probably the youngest as well.

Nick Parfitt is Chief Analyst​ in DCD Intelligence for the Asia Pacific region. He has conducted research and analysis on data centers and associated markets since starting to work with DatacenterDynamics​ in 2006. In that time he has been responsible for the design of and reporting on the DCD Global Datacenter Census and has written the 2013 publication on Data Center Power Consumption.