Cisco woos datacenter clients

According to Amit Malik, VP-Cisco India (East), "About 76 per cent of corporates believe cost-effective datacenters as their priority. We have created a regional focus for all our businesses. We are therefore hosting seminars and meetings to educate regional businesses in the usefulness of 3.0 datacentres. We are also targeting the small and medium enterprises which have a turnover of around Rs 200-300 crore, or organizations with 200-250 computers."

Datacentres will find a growing opportunity in India as companies look at energy-saving datacenters. Also, rapid expansion of companies is expected to push up the need for more cost-effective, power-saving datacenters, Malik pointed out.

"Eastern India has lined up a number of Greenfield projects. Businesses in east are growing by over 50 per cent ever year, reason why sale of datacenters will automatically increase," Malik said.

Cisco is also looking at smaller towns like Bhubaneswar, Raipur, Durgapur, Siliguri, among other locations, for pitching its datacenters.

"The biggest consumers of datacenters right now are the manufacturing and education sectors. Several educational institutes are investing in campus modernization with LAN connectivity and wi-fi. Moreover, most institutes are gearing up to offer distant learning courses, which again pushes up the usefulness of datacenters," Malik claimed.

According to Malik, the need of hour for SMEs and MNCs is reduction of power and cooling consumption to cut costs and align with green business practices.

Currently, the server environment and the server access layer of the network are particular areas of focus for Cisco.

Since the scale of the server environment is such, with hundreds or even thousands of servers, small changes can have significant effects.

Multi-core computing and virtualization technologies are rapidly changing the data center landscape, promoting the need for higher-bandwidth, lower-latency switching.

According to IDC, energy and cooling expenses will grow eight times faster than purchasing costs of new servers through 2010.

According to IDC, storage capacity is exploding at a rate of almost 60 per cent per year. The accelerated growth is forcing IT executives to rethink what type of storage system is best suited for their data - and to consider the costs in light of shrinking floor space and rising costs of power.

The top 10 storage predictions for 2008 by IDC include new data storage models such as object-based storage, green storage technology, which helps companies reduce their carbon footprint and energy expenditure, and new forms of storage delivery such as online storage services.

IDC predicts solid state will make a significant impact on reducing heat from spindle usage in server blade deployments and to boost functionality in mobile devices.