Improving efficiency of data centres in India: A review

Abstract

In the past decade, India has witnessed an exponential increase in the demand for digital storage, from 1 petabyte in 2001 to more than 34 petabytes by 2007. They also continue to grow at a compounded rate of 25-30%. Datacenter growth is driven by increasing requirements from the sectors such as financial institutions, telecom operators, manufacturing and services. While large financial institutions and telecom companies are likely to build captive Datacenters for hosting their growing data storage needs, Datacenter service providers are expected to invest significantly to multiply their capacities, so as to fulfill the demand arising from small and midsize users. Datacenter is highly energy intensive. With the increasing energy cost, the increase in operational cost is inevitable. Therefore it becomes necessary to reduce the energy consumption to offset the increasing operational cost and to maintain competitiveness. Hence the Datacenters in India need to incorporate innovative designs for energy efficiency and embrace the concept of "Green IT" for sustained growth. Existing Datacenters need to adopt the best practices in design, operation and maintenance to achieve operational excellence. New datacenters have to adopt the energy efficiency measures by design. The objective of this paper l is to identify the best practices followed in Indian Datacenters as well as provide guidelines on incorporating energy efficiency aspects at design stage for new datacenter. Design/methodology/approach - Conducting research exploring secondary data and web based resources including white papers, consolidating research articles, industrial and technological hypothecation.