The Changing Face Of Data Center Technologies

We spoke to Rajesh Shetty, Director, Data Center & Virtualization Sales, Cisco India & SAARC to understand the challenges faced by new-age data centers due to the influx of cloud technologies.

- Adeesh Sharma

Q Around a decade back there were multiple inhouse data centers within one organization. How has the scenario changed since then?

Currently data centers are getting consolidated. It started from the time when cloud scenario start emerging. Many of the ITes companies started creating their private cloud, private cloud is nothing but creating a cloud environment within their enterprise.

We believe that over a period of time it is going to be a combination of both private and public cloud infrastructure. There would be no particular solution of just being 100% inhouse or solely relying on cloud, it should be a combination of both the entity depending on the workload. That’s where the hybrid cloud is becoming prevalent.

Q) What is the complexity in managing hybrid cloud as compared to managing things that are purely on a private cloud? 

Considering the evolution of a workload, as an enterprise they have a specific business requirement and accordingly the customer basically goes for one of these two approaches– 1)some prefer to leverage own private cloud/datacenter 2)while some are not sure about the scalability so they start leveraging the public cloud.

But overtime, it becomes evident that, there is an inherent inefficiency in both the models as the scalability offered by public cloud is very high and additionally it provides processing power and more storage. But application performance, security & visibility as in terms of what is happening in the datacenter is more accurate in a private cloud. In such a scenario, customers mainly focus on distribution of data. Here he has to differentiate on the part that can be kept in-house. For instance, if they need a large scale yearend process they can leverage the public cloud. There are certain workloads that can be kept on the public cloud alone and not be brought to the private cloud.