Co-located at the tip of an iceberg: CtrlS and ambition

HYDERABAD, INDIA: Sridhar Reddy, Founder & CEO, CtrlS Datacenters Ltd., an IT enabled Managed Service Provider(MSP), helps to locate the penetration levels and possibilities of a co-location data centre concept in India and why tough compliance keys, outages or penalties have not made his ambitions veer off on a ctrl Z path.

Between formats like IaaS to VPN to modular data centres at another end of the spectrum , where and why a co-location data centre market would thrive, specially in India?

The model has worked for many years now since the advent of attempts by telecom majors. It can be credited to the telecom revolution and with fibre connectivity, 3G, 4G etc taking momentum, so many solutions for mainstream verticals have emerged with increased bandwidth availability. When you add to it the power of virtualization, these business models get more and more popular. Currently lots of people are thinking and talking of small POCs (Proof of Concepts) in India. Majority of large enterprises may not have moved to Cloud while some of them are going for dedicated set-ups or private clouds or IaaS or virtualized options.

We have about 2000 clients and 500 of these are mid-market ones who are putting up their applications in dedicated environments. There is so much potential waiting to be unleashed. Three years back we used to sell the concept per se but today the industry has evolved a lot. We would be launching over twenty new products and services next year.

Is it easy with required demands like flexibility, scalability, control etc at an enterprise degree?

Surprisingly, the most active and aggressive vertical we have witnessed so far is BFSI which, as it goes without saying, has the most stringent of requirements for obvious reasons. We have proved to companies that if they are seeking extra security or control levels, we can be in a position to provide them all imperatives. CtrlS' datacenters across Hyderabad, Mumbai and Delhi are spread over an combined areas of 370,000 sq.ft (appx.).

We always try to additionally strengthen our offering with the critical foundation for helping customers gain deep insight into and exceptional control over their complex, mixed IT environments. Having clocked a growth rate of 30 to 40 per cent with managed services I would say, we have still only touched the tip of the iceberg.

How do you perceive the interplay of compliance for such a data centre format?

Our facilities are geared up enough. Besides, from my view, compliance is an opportunity. If regulators set benchmarks for a certain tier 4 or 3 data centre with zero data centre loss structure, it is a positive for us. It is about the way the systems are structured, the way concurrent power lines are ensured (which by the way is an exceptional move for a country like India and we managed this capability for our customers with special permissions), and the way special metering approaches, better security, better uptime etc. have to be assured.

If the industry is leaning towards DCIM, Big Data etc, does it make your market interesting too?

 

Big Data would be surely very impactful. To use these capabilities, one needs to manage data centres as per the new set of needs. We have set up a Centre of Excellence for the same which is vendor-neutral and telecom-neutral as well.

Outages have heavy connotations in this space. You have carved some attention as pioneers of penalty-based SLAs in this terrain. But does it rhyme well with the business model?

We give our customers architecture than can provide great control. Yes, we are the only tier 4 data centre to give that level of SLA and for five to six years we have promised exemption from monthly payments for even levels like a two-minute downtime. We have designed a great infrastructure which takes into account all these factors and outages. Provisions like DG sets and fuel to run in case of outages etc are some more ways to ensure immunity. Not only that, we have 50 selection criteria for site pickings. When we select buildings they are never in a flood zone, for example.

Such approaches help us to promise customers stronger outcomes and help us to deliver them well. With Asia's largest IV Datacenter to its credit, we provide unmatched hosting capabilities through enhanced connectivity, multiple redundancies, fault tolerant infrastructure with a guarantee of a 99.995 per cent uptime with penalty backed Service Level Agreement (SLA). For instance, our recent addition, the Datacenter is in the San Diego Spectrum area of California, also entails benefits like reduced response time through effective management of Indian and US servers, higher accountability under single uptime SLA, etc.