Surge in adoption of hyperscale and microdata centres in India

Legrand has been in the data center space for many years now, through various organizations such as Legrand itself, Raritan, Servertech and Numeric that had been operating as separate entities but approaching the same set of customers.

We spoke to Sanjay Motwani, Vice President -APAC, Business Head - Legrand Data Center Solutions, to understand Data Center adoption, demand and security.

Adoption of hyperscale and microdata centres

Let’s take a step back and understand the Indian geography. India is a massive country and has a population that is well dispersed. For a business to reach the customers or the target audience in various parts of the country, they need to be able to have an infrastructure that supports this – here micro data centers come into the picture. These are particularly helpful to easily access a wide audience effectively and offer better services, be it healthcare, retail, or FSI sector.

Hyperscale data centers are essential to handle the large volumes of data being generated each day. Hyperscalers have recognized the potential and size of the data center market in India, given the population, growing broadband connections, increasing focus on digital transformation, and businesses getting on the data center bandwagon. Many hyperscale providers have been present in India such as Amazon, Google and are further expanding by either setting up more data centers or scaling up the racks in existing ones. We are also witnessing greater investments by colocation data center providers who are not only increasing footprint in the market but also facilitating the growing requirements of Hyperscalers.

Demands from the customers

The volume of data that is generated has increased and continues to increase every day. An example, earlier, the average power consumption in a rack used to be less than 5 kW which has now reached 8-10 kW per rack. The shows that the power consumption has nearly doubled. Today within India we have instances where the FSI sector is consuming nearly 22kW while in some cases in government it is 44 kW consumption per rack. This is a massive amount of data or computes capacity which is being utilized per rack.

When we talk about change in demands, there is requirement of more power, bigger racks, reduced operating costs, tools to be able to optimize power utilization and efficient utilization of existing space to add more infrastructure. Earlier height of a rack used to be 42U, but now customers are expecting 48-52 U. Every time we need to expand, we simply cannot build new data centers. Hence, the trend of vertical infrastructure is coming into play which improves operational efficiencies.

Ensuring security

Every organization deploys its own security policies & tools. Security as an aspect is covered in our portfolio, especially intelligent solutions. These solutions are enabled to comply with the existing environment of the customers and do not necessitate any changes to the existing infrastructure. Secondly, we provide our own security enhancements that work well with the already established security solutions of the customer, providing an added layer of security.

Taking power distribution units (PDUs) as an example – PDUs provide power to each server but the access to a PDU or managing it – whether to turn off or turn on the power – requires authentication levels. Besides PDUs, access to the infrastructure like racks must also be secured physically, and here we have a product called ‘Smart Door Handles’ that offers single or dual-factor authentication.

The green data centers and its adoption in India

A green data center is a computing facility that is built, managed, and operated on the principles of green technology. The best way to comply with green technology trends is by optimising power utilisation and using alternate energy. We believe that we are on the right path but are a long way to go. We are experiencing solar power adoption – data centers are planning to completely rely on solar power. However, green technology does not only refer to using natural resources it is also about energy utilisation.

We are always working to come up with improved solutions to build a more sustainable future for the industry. We recently unveiled the Infinium Quantum Fiber System designed for advanced data center applications. Infinium Quantum is an industry-leading lowest loss optical fiber system offering a 67% improvement over industry-standard systems and also reduces overall energy consumption by up to 30%. With this launch, we aim to offer higher efficiency, flexibility, and scalability to the growing data center needs, without additional costs.

Our philosophy of a data center for agility is to design the data center which will allow customers to be flexible and scalable for the future. Be it power capacity, space or even going vertical or cooling, we are providing solutions to build a future-ready data center that can grow as per requirements.