Power off CIOs on - CIOL News Reports

Power off, CIOs on

As various states turn to load shedding and power cuts become an everyday headache, CIOs have their own share of challenges and solutions

Pratima Harigunani

Thursday, September 04, 2008

MUMBAI, INDIA: Dismal monsoons and consequent power troubles are leaving marks of worries on CIO brows for sure.

India faced a power deficit of 73,050 million units between April 2007 and March 2008, as an internal official audit by the Ministry Statistics and Programme Implementation (S&PI) showed recently.

The audit pointed that 6,53,172 million units of power were supplied last fiscal against a demand of 7,26,222 million units. The 73,050-million unit deficit was largely in Bihar, Gujarat, Haryana, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, and Uttar Pradesh.

All the regions have continued to experience energy as well as peak demand shortage for varying degrees on an overall basis. This is an inevitable reality already but it has left IT heads of many organizations fraught with problems on a regular basis as the day-to-day operations, data centers and IT backbones face a power battle everyday.

Reactions to the challenge range from frustrated ire to short-term quick fixes to long-term investments.

Organizations like Karur Vysya are switching to new data center to combat power outage

"We didn't expect situation to go as bad in Tidal Park too. No we every Monday, we are switching to our back up center in Hyderabad, which is relatively eased from power offs," Said S Sekhar, assistant general manager, IT Department, Karur Vysya Bank.

The bank has a 7000 sq ft data center in Chennai and a 1000 sq ft one in Hyderabad. Now it is planning to set up a new data center in Chennai to ensure zero data loss.

The Central Electricity Authority (CEA) has already projected more power shortages in 2008-09 with the estimated energy shortage of about 8.8 per cent and peak shortage of about 18.1 per cent in the country.

South or North, the power worry furrows are on many CIO foreheads.

For APL Logistics that has to operate with containers in remote locations and the outskirts of North India, power shortage is becoming a grave issue, more so given the 24/7 operations schedule of the organization.

"Sometimes it is a two-day outage, and we can't rely on power supply that way and so we resort to centralized operations on back-up mode. Power is crucial for us as we operate from remote terminals," shares C Shekhar Jajware, director-IT and customer support, APL Logistics.

“There is a power crisis for sure. Running on generators or gas also has its own set of problems with the costs going up. Running on gas for instance, directly shows up a four-fold jump in costs,” he adds.

He remarks that Green IT issues thus are very different for CIOs in the US and for CIOs in India. "There they don't have to talk about power issues. In Indian context, the situation is drastically different."

Others like AK Dinkar, GM (OP), MTNL is betting on back-up and stand-by modes to take care of the situation which is still not that pinching.

Ditto for Mumbai-based Sanofi Aventis. "We are not experiencing that much trouble and IT has a lot of back-up with UPS and DGs. But still we are doing as much possible to keep in mind the environmental responsibilities," Says Cedric D'SOUZA, manager-IT, Sanofi Aventis.

At Hinduja group, a major effort is happening in the form of a centralized UPS solution along with bringing down the cost of maintenance.

"This is in line with efforts like CRT-TFT monitors, avoiding printouts as much as possible and using more emails instead," tells Satish B Mahajan, senior manager IT.

And as per the audit, the government has estimated that India will require an installed capacity of over 200,000 megawatt (MW) by 2012 to meet the electricity demand, which will be 60 per cent more of what the country has at present.

The study indicated that industrial production suffered by 25 per cent due to the extremely erratic power situation in February and March 2008, while captive power stations within the industrial premises are running at half the capacities because of expensive fuels such as diesel and petrol that have become much more costly.

And manufacturing productivity is just one glimpse of the toll that power shortage can take on the industry. Day-to-day operations, IT and administrative demands is another story altogether.

It's a high-voltage question and the answer is still flickering low.

As APL's Jajware appeals, "The industry on both the sides of the fence should take this challenge upfront. Let's innovate new ideas, new technologies as well as smarter ways of solving the power issues."

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