At its recent Infrastructure Operations and Data Center Summit, Gartner provided its 2012 outlook for the Indian data center market. The analyst firm estimated that the Indian IT infrastructure market consisting of servers, storage and networking equipment would reach $2.05 billion in 2012, growing 10.3% from 2011. It also predicted that the IT infrastructure market was expected to reach $3.01 billion by 2016.The findings further indicated that storage would have a CAGR of 18.9%.
According to Aman Munglani, Research Director, Gartner, the primary reasons for this growth could be attributed to the fact that enterprise storage requirements were on the rise and that storage capacities were expected to grow by 60-70% in the next five years.
Server growth for the same period was estimated to be a lower 5.8%. Munglani attributed the lower figure to the fact that organizations continued to virtualize their server infrastructure thereby increasing utilization levels and reducing the need to deploy additional servers. However, he was quick to point out that most Indian organizations were beyond the phase where they saw virtualization as a cost reduction exercise. Rather, they saw it as a means to make their IT infrastructure agile. With organizations looking to go from being 30-40% virtualized to around 70% virtualized, spending on x86 virtualization is expected to continue.
Navin Mishra, Principal Analyst, Gartner, said that virtualization would be looked at as more of a business enabler to shorten time to market. Organizations that have deployed virtualization, will start seeing business value within the next one year. Organizations were also said to be looking at modular data centers, which was leading to spending on networking equipment. Also with bandwidth requirements on the rise, organizations were looking at fatter pipes, which would further augment spending on networking.
Blade servers have seen strong adoption and organizations are looking at stacking as many as 120 blades in a single rack. Fueled by the interest in modular data centers, blade servers will continue to see rapid growth. On the storage front, organizations are investing in scale-out systems. Given the adoption of virtualization and blades, overall hardware buying may slow down. Though organizations would not readily retire their old applications, especially those which still help them meet business goals, they will continue to invest in IT as the need arises.
Organizations are focusing on investing in technologies that can scale up in accordance with business requirements and save them the tedious process of IT infrastructure procurements that can take up to a year or so. Converged infrastructure has found few takers. While there are products from almost all leading vendors such as Cisco, IBM and HP, there have been few known deployments as the solutions are relatively new and are on the expensive side. Moreover, organizations could end up spending almost six to nine months procuring, testing and deploying these solutions on account of their newness.
As these solutions offer, compute storage and networking in one box, organizations are worried about excessive dependence on a single vendor for support and services. Having said that, organizations will test and go on to adopt converged IT infrastructure as they get more comfortable using these solution infrastructure spends in organizations, particularly in large enterprises, for the next few years will be focused on building private Clouds. Mid-sized and smaller enterprises will evaluate the prospect of building a private Cloud but start off by purchasing Cloud services from a service provider.
Munglani also highlighted the fact that a lot of IT infrastructure adoption would be driven largely by data center service providers. They would be looking at providing managed, co-location or Cloud services. While this could lead to greater technology adoption by service providers than by enterprises, it would not greatly affect the revenues of IT infrastructure vendors. Mishra observed that enterprises were increasingly focusing on adopting co-location and hosting services and estimated a 20% CAGR increase in the market for data center services between 2012 to 2016. The managed services industry, according to Gartner, is expected to grow at around 25% CAGR over the next three to four years.
Cloud service adoption is currently slow. By 2013-14, the Cloud would start seeing healthy adoption and this would impact the way that data center managers manage their IT set-ups. Hybrid Clouds would see good adoption by then. As hybrid Cloud adoption grows, the role of an IT manager or CIO would change from focusing on ‘keeping the lights on’ to that of an IT service broker to the enterprise, creating service catalogs, compliance frameworks and governance policies.
harshal.kallyanpur@expressindia.com