GPX first DC in India to offer an Open Cloud Exchange service: Manoj Paul

GPX, a privately-held company, designs, owns, and operates, next generation, carrier neutral data centers (DCs) in the rapidly developing commercial markets of Africa and South Asia regions. The data centers are strategically positioned in hub locations, which have easy access to important undersea cable systems.

GPX is leading the technology race by being first to offer Tier4 certified design infrastructures and environments combined with “true” carrier neutrality in rapidly emerging markets. Manoj Paul, MD, GPX India, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: What are the emerging trends for datacenter networking in 2020+?

Manoj Paul: The data center industry is growing very rapidly. Typically, a new DC building gets fully occupied and is sold out in 2-3 years. But when customers located in one DC, expand to in a new DC building, they need high-speed connectivity, multiple 100gbps between the two locations.

Data Center Interconnect (DCI) Network is the new emerging requirement. GPX is the first DC service provider to have laid its own fiber and built its own DCI network between its two DCs in Mumbai providing reliable and cost-efficient links to offer campus-like networking connectivity between the two DCs. This is the first network that uses 432 core outdoor ribbon fiber, single run, three path protection to provide utmost reliability scalable to support 9Tbps of traffic and more.

Carrier neutral data centers are becoming more popular so that customers have multiple options for building their network switch fabric based connectivity like Internet Exchange, Cloud Exchange and direct peering between Telcos and ISPs with Content providers (OTTs) over multiple 100gbps links.

DQ: How is the market now for adoption of hybrid cloud and datacenter virtualization?

Manoj Paul: Cloud adoption has been seeing steady growth worldwide and also in India. According to Gartner, with the total public cloud services spend in India at $2.4 bn in 2019, India has recorded the third-highest growth rate of 24.5% in 2019 after China (33%) and Indonesia (29%)

It is expected that by 2022, over 60% of all mid and large enterprises would have migrated some of their apps and workloads on the cloud. The cloud industry in India is expected to grow at the rate of 30%+ YoY with the largest share being for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Eg., an organization, instead of buying a CRM package and procuring hardware to run it and deploying IT manpower to manage it, are preferring solutions on the cloud, so that they can avoid capex and grow easily on demand and scale down whenever required, without worrying about the uptime issues.

During this adoption of public cloud, organizations are most concerned about safety and reliability. Hence, a Direct Connect Service, wherein, an enterprise can have a leased line/MPLS connection to cloud service providers instead of the unreliable and unsecured internet, is helping cloud adoption.

GPX has been providing this service of Dedicated Connect for Amazon(AWS), Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud for the last three years with over 60 enterprises using this service at the GPX DC.

GPX is the first data center and interconnection provider in India to offer an Open Cloud Exchange service, which will enable a direct, private and secure connection to multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) hosted inside GPX data center. The enterprises can connect to multiple CSPs via a simple Cross-Connect provisioned and managed by GPX, thereby, empowering enterprises across India in their journey to the cloud.

GPX Open Cloud Exchange service is not dependent on any other data center provider or network carrier. GPX is the only cloud exchange provider that directly connects to the CSPs within the same DataCenter building, hence, ensuring:

• reliability – GPX Cloud Exchange connects to the CSP router over LAN fiber without depending on Telecom Service Providers networks.
• scalability -- can easily scale bandwidth by deploying a fiber cross-connect to the CSP router inside the data center.

DQ: How are you rebalancing your provision of data center services, colocation, and capacity management?

Manoj Paul: The presence of nodes for AWS Direct Connect, Google Dedicated Interconnect and Oracle Fast Connect within GPX Data Center and now with the Launch of the Cloud Exchange, there will be a big demand from enterprises who would like to set up their own IT infrastructure at the GPX DC and connect to CSPs within the DC for their DR on cloud or shiting various workloads to cloud.

GPX’s new datacenter was launched in Nov 2019, which can support 1,400+ racks, and has the required capacity to support this growth in demand from the enterprise customers.

We foresee big demand for network bandiwth for which the GPX DC has 12 telecom service providers, many of them have deployed DWDM network and can provide multiple 100Gbps bandwidths to meet any level of bandwidth that a customer may need.

DQ: How are you updating DR plans to reflect this new world of vendor-distributed work?

Manoj Paul: Cloud-based IT resources ensure easy connectivity for the distributed employees, partners and vendors. Cloud supports scalability based on need, both for computing resources and bandwidth.

Enterprises, even small and medium, can easily and cost-effectively deploy DR on cloud and ring-fence their IT infra with redundancy through a DR set up and thus ensure their operations are not impacted because of the failure of IT set up in one place. At GPX DC, an enterprise can have their own infrastructure and deploy DR at a cloud service providers s Singapore region, without paying for DC-DR bandwidth as the CSPs router is in GPx DC.

DQ: Are you looking at remote management of data centers?

Manoj Paul: Yes. That’s an option in case of a crisis. Firstly, we have trained manpower 24x7 in the data center to manage the operations. We restrict remote access to our systems to ensure there is no possibility of a failure due to security breach. However, we have provision for the senior management to have access to the management system remotely, and to be always aware of the operating parameters with live updates. The DCs can also be monitored from other DCs of GPX in case of a crisis.

DQ: Demand for cloud services will soar in some sectors, but wither in some other verticals. Which sectors, specifically?

Manoj Paul: Cloud adoption will accelerate in India as less than 50% of organizations have adopted cloud. Within that, most have a hybrid strategy of certain workloads on-premise and others on cloud. The journey to everything on the cloud is just starting for most Indian organizations. Hence, we can see good growth in the near future.

Specific sectors that will see a huge cloud demand, are:

Content and digital media: India is the only country with over 25 home-grown OTTs and 7 international OTTs, with around 10GB download per month per smartphone, the highest in the world. More and more content, including movies would be consumed over mobile, and smart TVs platforms, which would mean demand for more resources on the cloud to cater to this increased demand.

Education: It will be a lot more on digital media and most learning institutes instead of buying hardware and software will roll out online services using the power of the cloud.

OTT: India is the only country with over 25 homegrown and 7 international OTT networks, with around 10GB download per month per smartphone-highest in the world. More and more content including movies would be consumed over mobile, smart TVs platforms which would mean demand for more resources on the cloud to cater to this increased demand.

Financial institutes: More and more people will adopt electronic payments and most of the new-age financial institutes rely heavily on cloud services.

Ecommerce: It will grow, and so will be their use of public cloud.

Banking and insurance: More and more people will adopt electronic payments, branchless banking, number of online transactions would grow as most of the new-age financial institutes rely heavily on cloud services. The companies in this sector are actively using interconnection to scale, so they can better serve all the players, and consumers that need to interact in real-time, within the growing banking and insurance industry, along with the mobile digital payments industry.

Telecommunications: Telecom companies are also becoming content providers and delivering platforms for new modes of doing business, eg., Jio. Many telecom companies would also use cloud services. These communications carriers create new types of interconnection services to fight commoditization and scale those services to remain relevant in a more competitive marketplace.

Manufacturing: New segments in this the traditional market, such as the industrial Internet (Industry 4.0) and the Internet of Things (IoT), are driving the need for compute and storage in the cloud. Greater interconnection would be needed that allows the manufacturers and their customers to gain new efficiencies by scaling the digital capabilities of their IT infrastructures and reducing costs.

Securities and trading: Controlled within a regulatory environment and measured by the speed in which they can handle a growing number of transactions, financial services companies are leveraging cloud and better Interconnection to distributed users to scale their digital platforms to do more trades faster, while maintaining strict compliance regulations.

DQ: How are CIOs looking at datacenters in the Covid-19 situation?

Manoj Paul: During the Covid-19 lockdown, many organizations realized that their in-house DC is very difficult to maintain in the situation, wherein, the staff was not available in the office, and could not get to the office for rectification/upgrade due to travel restrictions during lockdown.

Many buildings also had their centralised ACs switched off by the officials to discourage people from coming to work. This meant the servers kept in those buildings had to operate without AC and some started malfunctioning. This resulted in many companies facing problems with their corporate e-mail as the server malfunctioned.

Moreover, since suddenly, several employees were logging in remotely, the Internet bandwidth at the head office got chocked leading to poor performance. This experience would push enterprises, small or large, to move out of their in-house data centers (server farms), and either migrate to cloud or move their inhouse IT infrastructure to the third party data centers like GPX.

The third-party data center service providers come under ESMA (Essential Services Maintenance Act). They can continue the operation even during such a lockdown period. If an organsation has their servers and other IT infrastructure deployed in a DC like that of GPX, it’s assured for continuous power, cooling and around the clock surveillance and maintenance. It also means that in case any maintenance support is needed, the engineers present inside the data center can provide the necessary remote hands support, and take care of the enterprises need, without any employee of the enterprise having to travel during a lockdown.

Moreover, in a situation like today, due to WFH, so many more employees and partners are logging in remotely. All that means the need for additional bandwidth. This can be a challenge, if only one or two service providers are present in the building of the enterprise. However, in a data center like GPX, which has 12 telecom service providers and over 130 ISPs present with their fiber infrastructure, an enterprise customer can easily get additional bandwidth of several 10G or even 100G at a competitive price, in a matter of few hours.

At GPX, the telcos have deployed their infrastructure and are providing several 100G links and provisioning additional bandwidth for an enterprise, which is generally at 100Mbps/500Mbps or 1Gbps is very easy.

DQ: Covid-19 may either kill the data center, or forever change storage. Elaborate.

Manoj Paul: In the next few years, we are going to see businesses and individuals continuing with the increased use of WFH, video conferencing, webinars and online learning. There will be more digital payments, wherein even grandpas and grandmoms will start paying online.

Higher adoption of cloud services and more enterprises would move out from in-house DCs to third-party DCs. All these would lead to a higher demand for data center colocation services. Note, that the growth in cloud services also means growth in data center business, where the CSPs host their servers.