The new economic growth engine: data centres in India

Data centres in India are a sunrise sector that promises to produce large-scale investments and jobs. The government is emphasizing data protection and self-reliance via data localization which is expected to boost the data centre market in the nation to $5 billion by 2023-24, growing at a CAGR of 25%. Data use per individual per month has risen by 2800% to 7.6 GB.

The Growing Need to Protect Data

The Indian government is emphasizing on self-reliance and data privacy protection to prevent infringement of Indian citizens' data by foreign entities. Data use in the country is rising fast thanks to the availability of cheap smartphones and mobile internet connections.

The pandemic-induced lockdown increased data use, with most employees working from home, accessing social platforms, live streaming content, and more. This has boosted the demand for storage capacities and bandwidth. By 2025 end, it is estimated that there will be about 850 million users of smartphones and 200 million consumers of smart TVs in India

These users are expected to utilize over five hours of video per day per device. This constant rise in data consumption is leading to demand for better storage, and this is where data centres in India are playing a big role.

How does a Data Centre Function?

Data centres in India host physical infrastructure and computer networks in secure facilities that store, share, and process business and personal data and information. Businesses face a huge investment in building and running their own data centre. The solution is to outsource your data centre to save costs and enjoy advantages such as risk management, scalability, and zero maintenance.

Cloud solutions enable users to get access to computing resources from any place, anytime. Today, power supply has become reliable in India, and Indian providers can operate efficient data centres that are as good as any in the world.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI)

Data centres in India have to use the right combination of networks, storage, and servers to support applications. After deployment of the infrastructure, the operations need to be scaled up rapidly without impacting the applications. HCI helps here by offering a simple-to-implement system, based on commodity hardware that allows you to scale by including more nodes in the deployment. HCI products are available from many leading vendors.

Compared to conventional data centres, HCI offers advantages such as easier administration and configuration, cloud integration, and scalability. Today, HCI use cases include analytics and logging, data recovery and backups, development and test environments, and branch office/remote office deployments.

Containers

Containers help to speed up application development by virtualizing the whole runtime environment. This enables developers to operate applications in a self-contained platform. Containers are lightweight, and you can create and destroy them rapidly, which makes them perfect for testing how applications function under specific conditions.

Microsegmentation

Conventional data centres in India have core security technology, and the North-South traffic in the facility is protected by security features. An increase in East-West traffic compromises security as it bypasses intrusion prevention tools, firewalls, and other security solutions, allowing malware to quickly spread and cause damage.

With microsegmentation, you can create secure areas in a data centre and isolate resources from each other. Thus, if a data breach occurs, you can minimize the damage. Microsegmentation is very agile as it can be performed in software.

GPU Computing

Conventional CPUs (central processing units) are no longer adequate as demanding workloads like IoT, machine learning, and analytics need higher processing power. GPUs (graphics processing units) are the answer as they can process multiple threads in a parallel manner.

Therefore, modern data centres in India are using GPUs for processing neural networking and AI tasks. This leads to many shifts in the architecture of the facilities, from their cooling needs to their connections to networks.

Scope of Data Centres

Modern data centres are using advanced technologies and deployments to cater to the needs of a distributed and dynamic world. Older technologies are being replaced as the focus is on improving computing resources, speed, data storage, reliability, and scalability.

Data centres in India are critical for the success and profitability of companies. A lot of state governments are providing incentives to companies to set up data hubs, and the facilities are becoming more sophisticated. Many business conglomerates in the nation are thus looking to enter this fast-growing industry. STT GDC India commands a 33% share of the data centre market in India* and run 18 state-of-the-art facilities in nine cities.