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Environmental control modules for the data centre

Power conditioning majors are venturing into modular solutions for cooling, infrastructure management and power protection for data centres, says Kusum Makhija

As data centres mushroom in India, they are engendering a corresponding need for environmental control solutions that work in the same form factors as servers and storage—the ubiquitous rack. While the traditional approach has been to provide an uninterrupted power supply to avoid downtime, vendors are now offering solutions that provide heat control and power management as well. Niju V, Industry Analyst, Industrial Technology Practice, Frost & Sullivan India says, “Most of the IT infrastructure in the country today is supplier-driven, and so is the case with data centre equipment. Our studies on facilities management show that 25 percent of the total UPS usage in the IT/BPO space is dedicated to data centre management, so power solutions are emerging as a critical part of the enterprise.”

Take APC (American Power Conversion), which is moving beyond its traditional role of a UPS player into the data centre management space. It launched its NCPI (or the Network Critical Physical Infrastructure) range of products in India a year ago.

Says Pankaj Sharma, the company’s Country Manager, “APC’s InfraStruXure technology provides data centres on demand. With this technology, NCPI can be deployed in a scalable or modular manner. NCPI includes not just the power (or the UPS), but also power distribution, cooling, cooling distribution, service, and the physical infrastructure management systems that support the hardware and software platforms of mission-critical data centres and facilities. The scalability and modularity of InfraStruXure enables a pay-as-you-grow approach, cutting out waste and reducing TCO.”

The NCPI solution for data centres from APC is targeted at both small and large enterprises. It is an end-to-end solution designed for critical server rooms, data centres large and small, and disaster recovery (DR) centres. “Organisations with a server room (or a DR/data centre) are our targets. Most organisations would fit that slot except the smaller set-ups. We will try to reach even these customers,” states Sharma.

Analyses Alok Shende, Director, ICT, Frost & Sullivan, “Enterprises today are keen on investing in DR and are making sure that data remains unaffected. The growing demand for such solutions has fuelled the need for high performance data centres and servers. Any Level 2 data centre today is generally outsourced by the company to a third party, and the SLAs for these come with a host of services that go beyond power protection.”

From discrete to integrated

Says Sandeep Gupta, Head of Product Management, Corporate Planning and Strategy at Emerson Network Power, “The market is moving from individual products to integrated solutions. The needs of customers are fast changing towards an adaptive architecture. With the advent of blade servers, cooling needs have shot up. The market for extensive power conditioning and physical infrastructure management solutions is thus poised to grow.”

Sharma agrees. “There is a rise in server consolidation and virtualisation in the data centre/server room. This trend is the result of increased dependency on IT and also rising real-estate prices, especially in metros. Unlike a few years ago, more data is generated by mission-critical applications residing on servers, hence the need for higher density servers with optimum capacity utilisation has emerged.”

"As the market shifts from consuming discrete products to integrated solutions, customers are demanding an adaptive architecture" -Sandeep Gupta Head of Product Management, Corporate Planning & Strategy Emerson Network Power

"The current trend is towards dual power servers that add another level of redundancy, eliminating a single point of failure" -Deepak Sharma Managing Director Eaton Power Quality

The key need arising from server consolidation is the ability to cool hot-spots reliably. Unpredictable cooling performance, loss of redundancy, loss of static pressure and excessive dehumidification are all a fact of life in the modern data centre. The downside of server virtualisation is that a larger number of processors are squeezed into a given space, generating more heat and thus placing a strain on cooling systems—hence the need to have a data centre architecture to support new, more powerful cooling systems.

Says Deepak Sharma, MD, Eaton Power Quality, “The new trend is a dual power server giving one more redundancy at the server level. It gives flexibility to the customer to go for two sets of UPS power sources rather than taking power from a single source. This enhances redundancy and eliminates the single point of failure.”

Going beyond power backup

Vendors are moving beyond providing standalone power backup solutions. The growth in the number of data centres in India is forcing them to diversify their portfolio. “It has become imperative for traditional UPS vendors to diversify into these solutions as the margins in the standalone UPS market are low. Also, they can build their revenue models around services. Enterprises these days are willing to outsource their non-core mission-critical IT applications so that they can focus more on their core competencies. This is the value proposition for vendors such as APC and Emerson,” observes Niju V.

The acquisition route too is working for them. In October 2000 APC acquired privately-held Airflow, a leading precision cooling equipment manufacturer. In June 2003 the company took over Tecnikon, a Britain-based developer of self-contained rack enclosures designed to isolate and cool high-density equipment housed in data centres. “The acquisition of Tecnikon highlighted APC’s continued investment in cooling solutions to reduce downtime associated with complex cooling challenges stemming from the increasingly high temperatures in densely-populated data centre racks,” says Pankaj Sharma. The acquisition in Q3 05 of NetBotz, a company in the physical security and management space, shows that APC continues to buy expertise in new areas.

Emerson has recently launched power conditioning products for the data centre space. “We have launched next-generation products for the air and power divisions: the Liebert XD series, Liebert PeX, Liebert NXa and Super 400 D specifically designed for critical networks that require protection against the spectrum of input and output power disturbance. Targeted mainly at the IT, BPO, telecom, and pharmaceutical verticals, these next-generation products will assist in extending Emerson’s leadership in the enterprise segment. The business opportunity in this segment is currently valued at around Rs 500 crore and growing at 20 percent year-on-year,” informs Shrikant Bapat, the company’s Senior Vice-president for Uptime Solutions.

A substantial market is anticipated

According to Pankaj Sharma, APC has 400 customers in India in the NCPI space. The company has 30 dedicated partners for the NCPI range of products, and is ramping up this number to over 100 this year. “The data centre management solutions market is at around $150 billion. A significant amount of this would come from countries such as India where most remote data centres are located; it would also come from the medium-to-large enterprises here,” says Pankaj Sharma. APC is estimating a growth rate of 15-20 percent in the enterprise space and an overall market growth of 20-25 percent year-on-year.

In India however the market for such products ranges from a small server room for an SMB to large data centres. The power needs of these data centres are different from each other in terms of power conditioning and physical infrastructure. APC therefore has different service modules for medium and large companies and a pay-as-you-grow model for emerging enterprises. “The pressure on CIOs and IT departments to deliver service out of the data centre is growing. The challenges are increasing, and hence the pay-as-you-grow model is sound and allows you to be agile and support the business as it changes. It permits you to change your data centre approach mid-stream and take advantage of any future advancements in technology or the environment,” elaborates Pankaj Sharma.

“No research has been conducted to zero in on marketshare. Our products can be used to monitor environment conditions, access, and genset performance, and send alarms to a central monitoring system. We have executed a large number of data centre power conditioning projects both in the west and in Asia,” says Deepak Sharma.

These solutions find traction from verticals such as BFSI and BPO. “Our solutions cater to IT organisations such as BPOs, call centres, software development centres and server farms, and verticals such as power, steel, petroleum, cement, automobile, BFSI and government,” says Gupta of Emerson. Reveals his colleague Bapat, “We have a marketshare of 60 percent in precision air-conditioners, 50 percent in UPS, and 15 percent in transfer switches.”

Niju V says that the market for power conditioning solutions is still at an early stage in India. However, he does see potential with “demand for such solutions likely to come from medium to large enterprises.”

Although there are no formal numbers available on the market size in India, going by the vendors’ optimism, modular power and infrastructure management solutions for data centres appear to be poised for growth.

kusum@expresscomputeronline.com