NxtGen Smart Infrastructure Forum highlights enterprise cloud services benefits

Some common myths are still prevalent amongst SMBs and even larger enterprises.

• Data centers are very capital intensive;

• On-premise data centers are only for large organizations and cannot be built in a regular commercial environment.

 NxtGen Datacenter and Cloud Services, one of India's leading data center services solution providers, went a long way in dispelling some of these myths during the Smart Infrastructure Forum in Chennai attended by more than 70 enterprises and 20 partners.

SatishVishwanathan, head products, NxtGen elaborated on the concept of On-Premise Data Center (OPDC), a plug and play self-contained data center on the organization's own premises without the associated capex. Reduced power consumption and cooling requirements and no AMCs help organizations achieve this and maintain a low opex as well.

The OPDCrange starts from a compact single rack configuration for SMBs to single and dual row configurations for mid-sized loads. Another advantage of an OPDC over a hosted datacenter environment is the limitations of standardization set by the datacenter service providers. OPDC also offers more capacity (three times the server and storage in the same space) and increased uptime.

NxtGen also promises continuous central management from its central command cente; it boasts of a High Density Data Center (HDDC) in Bengaluru-it is a purpose built 20MW facility, cloud-ready and offering 15KW power density per rack. Vishwanathanalso informed of more NxtGen datacenters coming up in Mumbai and in the Middle East.

What was emphasized during both the sessions with enterprises and partners was NxtGen's offerings of Enterprise Cloud Services. Private clouds will also be offered along with OPDC for increased capacities for computing and storage. Temporary demand for compute resources can be facilitated at both the HDDCand OPDCby subscribing to a Hybrid cloud infrastructure.

This offers immense elasticity to IT platforms and should lead to the logical evolution of resource on demand and enterprises using pay on demand model. NxtGen's suggestion for enterprises, large and SMBs alike, is to use private cloud for core applications and leverage public cloud for increased capacity and for non-core and web applications.

NxtGen also justified through independent researches the growing demand from organizations in adopting coud services. PiyushSavla, Regional Head, NxtGen, quoted the Gartner study done in September 2013 about the adoption of private cloud. The study claims that 11% of organizations have no plans of implementing cloud services while 45% of organizations are planning and 44% of them have already deployed.

Both NxtGen and its technology partner Emerson exhorted their solution partners to help customers choose from a combination of their Enterprise Cloud Services according to their own business requirements. Anshul Kumar, senior manager, Emerson spoke about Emerson's new SmartCabinet and SmartRow offerings and explained to partners on the usage of their products and their power efficiency values.

The business values from OPDC and Enterprise Cloud Services were also emphasized during a panel discussion attended by SatishVishwanathan, head products, NxtGen, P VigneshGanesan from Microsoft, Ram Lakshminarayan from Intel and SaravananElango, CIO of Aricent.

The icing on the cake at the Smart Infrastructure Forum was NxtGen's announcement to enterprises to sponsor one project for setting up a live application on cloud for six months. As part of the sponsorship, NxtGen would set up a virtual data center at its own facilities and work with CIOs to make the project successful.