SD-WAN is now on the investment priority list

Nokia claims that its Data Center Fabric solution enhances design and operations for all cloud builders. Made for webscale companies, service providers and enterprises, it offers cloud builder networking teams an open network operating system (NOS) and a declarative, intent-based automation and operations toolkit. In an interview with Pradeep Chakraborty, the company’s Emerging Business and Enterprise Head for India Vinish Bawa talks about the post-COVID-19 data center trends, the growing demand for SD-WAN and how it is evolving, the Data center Interconnect (DCI) Network, and the new offering. Excerpts:

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What are the trends that are likely to shape the Indian data center industry?

India is amongst the largest data-consuming nations – over 7000 peta-bytes of data consumption per month – and this is poised to explode. However, when it comes to data center storage, India lags behind the developed world as well as Asia-Pacific. With roughly 40 million less Internet users, Europe has more than 12 times its capacity to store data — 8,600 MW, compared to India’s 700 MW.

Migration to cloud-based business ops, varied government incentives, push for 5G/big data/ IoT and call for data localization will ensue a significant CAGR growth of up to 35% for the next few years. We will see an increased investment in the date center space. Businesses will be run on the pillars of green measures, including decreasing power bills through new technologies (hydro fuel cells), in tandem with ensuring the minimal environmental impact, operational efficiency through virtualization and automation, continued capex, but, with a mandate to streamline costs in an effective manner.

During the current COVID-19 crisis, we are now witnessing a trend towards remote management for unstaffed or understaffed data centers, especially to mitigate risks of infrastructure (server) failures. The other talked about trend of cloud computing moving towards edge computing, is still a work in progress. We are confident that as the economics permit, it just won’t be service providers capitalizing on the edge, but, edge cloud shall also cater to consumers, enterprise and telcos, thereby reinforcing the need of a robust data center supply.

What has been the impact of COVID-19 on the data center industry?