India has almost 40 per cent of its 1.2 billion people living in rural parts, wherein connectivity is patchy. The physical distance, coupled with quality power availability, often acts as constraints for digital needs. Data centres are addressing this issue.
“As far as the rural population is concerned. There are two aspects when it comes to data centres, the data centre itself is an exchange of data and it caters to everyone. Be it a person sitting in rural India or urban India. Data centre caters to everyone and anyone who has a smart phone in their hand is connecting to the data centre. The physical location of a person within the country and the world doesn’t matter; everyone is using a data centre in some way or the other,” said N. K. Jain, Principal Consultant, N.K. Jain Consulting Engineers.
India is rapidly going towards the hyperscale data centres which are centralised in various cities and metropolitan areas. Edge data centres will be prominent in tier II and III cities where these would directly serve to the consumers that are located in these areas instead of connecting to a main data centre every time. But coming back to the consumer point of view, the consumer does not have to select where they want to get connected, for example if they want to connect on Facebook, Whatsapp or Twitter the user will have to click on a particular app and log in.
“From this perspective it doesn’t matter where the data centre is. The people who are managing the data centre, the software and other areas, ensure that the user gets served with your data immediately without any latency. But yes for other enterprises, operators and people who are in the lower areas or in the industrial hubs which are in remote areas or are in rural areas. They will be able to host their services and will be able to connect their edge data centres in a much faster way than in the city,” said Jain.
We all know that in the rural areas the internet penetration is increasing along with the use of social media. Everyone now has a smartphone and connects back to the data centre. We need more data centres in India and there is a reason why all the major data centre providers are having a joint venture with India. “Our company is having a joint venture with WebWerks. Based on the reports the CAGR growth of the data centre industry is expected to grow at 14- 20 per cent. These are some of the reasons why investments are flowing in major data centre locations in India,” said Suppan Saravanamuthu, Director of Operations – APAC, Iron Mountain Data Centers.
Green Energy and Data Centres
“While there is growth in the data centre industry it also brings some challenges which include the amount of energy that it is consuming and the efficiency of the data centres. There are two major contributors for energy consumption. One is UPS as it plays an important role in data centre efficiency. Anything from 5 per cent to 10 per cent of energy consumption goes into the UPS. Another aspect of large energy consumption is cooling as it consumes anything in the range to 20 to 50 per cent of the total energy,” said Rakesh Singh, Technical Consultant, Uptime Institute.
He further explained that the data centres energy consumption is measured in PUE which is Power Utilisation Effectiveness the definition of which can be explained by an example let’s say there is a data centre of 1 MW, this means that you can install an IT hardware which consumes the energy of 1 MW and if the PUE is 1.5 which means the total energy consumption to operate that 1 MW is going to be one and a half times which means that the total utility power that it is going to consume is 1.5 MW.
“Having said that, you know that we are over 50 per cent which will either be consumed by the UPS or the cooling technology. Cooling consumes anywhere between 20-50 per cent this increased variant is because the energy consumption also depends upon the weather conditions of where the data centre is. For example if a data centre is installed in a very harsh environment like Delhi where the temperature goes to 48 degrees, cooling will consume more energy than it would have consumed in a city with a cold climate. If we look at the energy efficiencies in the past I would say about 15 years ago we were at a PUE of 2.5-2.6 and currently our average PUE is 1.5-1.6. The technology has played a major role in bringing down the PUE. There will be technologies in the future which will help in improving the reliability and efficiency of the system.”
For cooling there is also liquid cooling which brings a new dimension for energy consumptions within the data centres. There are various new technologies that are coming up which are helping today and will help in the future to improve the efficiency of data centres.
“As we all are aware that the data centres consume a lot of power and all data centres have to get their power through the nearest electricity grid any energy has to come through the grid. There are a lot of green power stations in the country. There is also a concept of power purchase where you can purchase the power from the market and most of the hyperscalers are directly buying power from the power producers who are either a solar power producer or windmill power producer. Power is directly coming into their data centre through the grid. Some of the state utilities are not very proactive in making this happen, there are various issues which the government is tackling. The utilisation of green energy is going to happen in the future,” said Jain.
He further added that many new users of the data centres are insisting that they should be provided with green energy in their servers and if that does not happen there will be commercial penalties.