Sify to open 200,000 sq.ft. data center in Mumbai
One of the pioneers in the commercial datacenter space in the country, Sify Technologies has plans to bring on stream its 200,000 sq.ft. data center in the coming month. Industry estimates this to be by far the largest single location data center space in the country. With 54% of operating expenses towards power consumption, the company plans to have a dedicated electrical sub-station on its premises.
“The datacenter usage has changed over the years from delivering client/server-based solutions to now being fast replaced with SOA and Web 2.0. We see the need to open up new locations which will effectively deliver these 3 services. Our locations house over 10,000 servers and over 800 terabytes of storage fabric, which are managed by a team of over 120 people to ensuring uptime. We are one of the few players that can boasts of a Level-3 data center in the country,” says Saji P K, VP-Technology, Sify Technologies.
The company opened its first data center in Mumbai in 2000, with a total area of 20,000 sq.ft. This was followed by a 7,000 sq.ft. located at the corporate office in Chennai in 2001. In 2006, the company deployed a 40,000 sq.ft. data center in Bangalore. In July, Mumbai will see the company inaugurate its largest ever single location data center spread over three floors each having a floor plate of 30,000 sq.ft. This location is expected to have a power density of 350 to 400 watt per sq.ft. as compared to the industry average of 100 watt per sq.ft.
The company has created SIMS or Sify Infrastructure Maintenance Standards, which helps it to manage the locations and solve any incidents arising. Costs of copper are a big issue, with estimates suggesting that in 2000 it would have taken Rs 10,000 per sq.ft. to wire a data center, which has now risen to four times.
Symantec to offer online fraud protection service
What started out one year back as a customized service to a few clients of security major Symantec, has today emerged as an independent revenue generating service. Globally launched in May, the online fraud protection service offers clients a set of services to protect their Internet presence from a variety of online threats such as phishing and pharming. The company aims to sell this service directly to its customers and will not be looking at its channels to take it to market.
The figure from its latest security threat report indicates that in the last six months of 2007, more than 85,000 phishing hosts were active. This is an increase of 167 percent from the first half of the same year.
“We had a requirement from our clients in Europe for the need of a complete service which protects their Internet presence around the clock. On a successful deployment for them, we are now packaging it as a service that anyone can avail of globally. Through this we offer a dedicated Resident Consultant who will use our global network capabilities to ensure that their Internet presence is protected at all times,” says Anil Chakravarthy, VP, Worldwide – Enterprise Services, Symantec.
The company has acquired a few clients in the country for this service and is targeting banks, brokerages, online merchants with a high transaction volume, and social networking sites.
This service will use threat analysis and filtering, on-site verification and analysis techniques of its Global Intelligence Network.
Netmagic to open 4th data center, to partner with HP
Mumbai-based Netmagic Solutions has plans to inaugurate its fourth data center in Chennai. One of the early entrants into the Managed IT Service Provider space which specializes in running Data Centers, Managed Hosting, Network Operations & Remote Infrastructure Management, this new facility will be on stream by the end of 2008. Additionally, the company has recently announced a partnership with HP to providing hosting and managed services, where both of them will jointly address the booming data center services market in the country.
“We have data centers in Mumbai, Bangalore and will open one in Chennai, which is expected to go live by the end of the year. Locally, it will be counted as one of the large data centers present. The need for data storage is tremendous, while we took six years to fill up a data center the size of 10,000 sq.ft., within the next six months we have already presold an equivalent space,” says Sharad Sanghi, CEO, Netmagic Solutions.
The company has recently announced a partnership with HP to providing hosting and managed services, where both of them will jointly address the booming data center services market in the country. The partnership will see HP in addition to providing hardware and applications to its customers, now include preferred hosting and managed services locally. Sectors that will be tapped initially are retail, healthcare, utility, education and manufacturing.
Technologically speaking, it’s data centers have been built on energy efficient practices to ensure that Hot Aisle / Cold Aisle anomalies do not exist. This is now being taken one step further to ensure that cooling is restricted to the racks in which the equipment is placed so that power consumption can be reduced. Adds Sanghi, “Virtualization has been adopted effectively, and we are one of the first to reap its benefits. As our income is calculated on revenue per rack, with virtualization, we can increase the output of the hardware rack density.”
With the average size of their data centers ranging from 40,000 sq.ft. to 60,000 sq.ft., the company has over 5000 servers in place and runs Windows, Solaris and Linux. The company is vendor agnostic and supports a few client applications that run on HP-UX. For its networking function, it has installed equipment from Cisco, Juniper, NetScaler, Foundry Networks and Alteon. The company has created its own data center management application entirely built with open source tools. This dashboard monitors the health of each equipment in the datacenter.
Concludes Sanghi, “We have grown from a 20 member team to 250 employees, and we have seen a very low attrition in our ranks. Our mandate is to attract and retail talent, as the skill set required to manage a data center is not easily available.”
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