How are datacenters evolving to address needs of modern enterprises?

Today, India is at the crux of digital transformation. Enterprises need to constantly upgrade themselves to ensure informed and smarter decisions. Vinay Sinha, Managing Director, Sales, at AMD, tells us more on how to go about doing this. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: What are the datacenter growth and market opportunities in India?

Vinay Sinha: India is poised to become the second largest datacenter market in APAC after China, and is a key market for AMD. With India at the crux of digital transformation, there is a need for enterprises to constantly harness and analyse real time data to make informed and smarter decisions. Dynamic workloads like these have triggered the need for modern datacenters that deliver elevated performance, scalability, security at a reduced total cost of ownership to organizations.

Growing adoption of Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is pushing the cloud spending to 7.2 bn by 2022, as per NASSCOM. With global and new local cloud service providers growing their presence in India, AMD EPYC based server platforms are positioned to help them deliver higher workload performance with power efficiency and density optimization.

The datacenter growth has also led to opportunities in areas such as conventional defence, meteorological studies, manufacturing, BFSI, research and development efforts, etc. Telecom sector will be one of the top sectors that will adopt high-performance server CPUs over the next 2-3 years as the need to strengthen and elevate the current 4G network increases, and more importantly to prepare for 5G.

DQ: What are some of the challenges faced by CIOs today? What are the factors driving them to shift towards modern and better datacenter solutions?

Vinay Sinha: In the last decade, businesses have gone through a transformation driven by the adoption of digital technologies like Data Science, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. This transformational shift is putting a lot of pressure on CIOs. As a result, they must accelerate performance by adapting to changing needs, from deployment to retirement.

In line with this, IT leaders have to meet business challenges by matching the right IT infrastructure to the right workload. With emerging technologies and even more complex workloads, enterprises seek disruption that re-imagines the datacenter, offering higher performance alongside improved efficiency with uncompromised security.

In addition to these, cost continues to be a challenging factor for enterprises, especially traditional organizations who are in the process of digital transformation. “Doing more with less” is becoming more relevant as IT becomes critical with digitization. We work closely with the CIOs to address these challenges in a collaborative way to drive development without compromising on resilience.

Over the last decade, the data center has gone through a huge transformation. We believe that this is largely driven by three factors such as Data deluge, AI/MI led applications and Edge computing. Performance continues to be a concern with growing volumes of data and applications.

With newer technologies, enterprise seek disruption that reimagines the datacenter, offering higher performance.

In addition to this, traditional security is no longer enough as data is rapidly moving outside the enterprises’ cloud and datacenter. And, lastly, cost will always remain a challenging factor for enterprise, especially traditional organizations who are undergoing digital transformation.

DQ: What do you think are the key priorities for a robust IT infrastructure?

Vinay Sinha: Businesses are extremely dynamic and IT infrastructure must be flexible to meet the demands of traditional and modern workloads. Businesses are hyper competitive today and they need to stay ahead of the curve with innovation and enhanced services.

This means that an organization must ensure its hardware, software, network resources and services are all in place and work in tandem. They need to collectively empower an agile and robust IT ecosystem and also fuel high performance capabilities. A strong IT ecosystem is further powered by a modern security solution which is hardened at the core that helps the organization guard their most important assets and data.

DQ: How is AMD bringing HPC for the datacenter?

Vinay Sinha: In 2017, we re-entered the datacenter market with the mission to deliver choice and innovation for the modern datacenter across high performance computing, enterprises and the cloud. Changing demanding workloads in the age of digitization pushed us to bring the 2nd Generation EPYC processors – the world’s first x86 datacenter processor based on 7-nanometer process technology last year.

With up to 64 Zen 2 cores and 128 threads, we have combined leadership performance, architecture, and security features to enable IT leaders solve complex challenges facing the datacenter. We are committed to delivering high performance computing along with significantly reduced total cost of ownership that bring better return of investments to our customers.

The EPYC processors are engineered to address the modern datacenter challenges through big data, virtualized environments and HPC workloads. Our innovation drives three strong pillars of energy efficiency, workload balance and security. With this, we are bringing new levels of server performance along with industry-leading efficiency to help reduce datacenter carbon footprint and performance leadership at every price point.

DQ: What is AMD’s strategy to increase market share in the datacenter space with EPYC in India?

Vinay Sinha: Datacenter is a key focus for AMD and India is a significant market to elevate our market growth in this space. With the EPYC server processers, we have been delivering record-setting performance across enterprise, virtualization, cloud and high-performance workloads. In India, AMD is uniquely positioned to help transform data heavy sectors such as e-commerce, BFSI, IT, manufacturing, telecommunications and the Government with solutions for the modern datacenter.

We will continue to partner with HPC and major service providers to bring EPYC to large and medium enterprises in India for their various workloads including virtualization, big data, machine learning and AI. Our channel partners, major OEMs and SIs will play an important role in our go-to-market plans as we continue to grow our market share.