IDCs: One-stop web shops?

SECURITY CAMERAS, swing to and fro following your movements as you step out of the futuristic lift. At successive doors, you have to insert your plastic card into a swiper, before they swing open. Finally you are in the very heart of the hightech facility - where biometric sensors examine your finger prints (or your retina), before giving you admittance to the ``server farm''.

Welcome to Cyquator, claimed to be ``India's first pure play Internet Data Centre'' in the heart of Mumbai's own burgeoning Silicon Valley, at Vashi. Co-founded by a trio of Indian entrepreneurs, who have put together about $ 3.5 million as capital, Cyquator's first IDC has just gone on stream in Mumbai, while two more in Delhi and Bangalore, will be commissioned later this year. The Vashi IDC has the capacity to host 3000 servers, and a total storage capacity of 1 terabyte. It takes 13,000 KW of energy to power the server farm, which comprises Sun, Compaq and IBM server hardware. Cisco and Nortel provide the main routing for the 24x7x365 facility - currently fashionable jargon for something that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days in the year without break. Internet Hosting services in IDCs like these can be of three kinds:

Shared: where several websites share the resources of a single server;

Dedicated: where one or more servers are dedicated by the IDC for the use of one client

Co-located: dedicated hosting where the server belongs to the client but is physically located in the IDC.

Pure Play IDCs offer facilities like web hosting, e-biz site hosting, storage and backup, server load balancing, security and firewall, messaging services and call centre facilities. To ensure that the clients have the required bandwidth whenever they need it ( including seasonal peaks), Cyquator has tied up with multiple Indian and foreign Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and will shortly have 12 MBPS on tap. Why does an IDC like Cyquator call itself a ``pure play'' operation? To distinguish itself from other players who may also be ISPs, or from purely telecom infrastructure providers. Mr Jitendra Israni, Chief Technology Officer at Cyquator, sees an explosion in Indian presence on the Internet and thinks his company is well positioned to attract customers who may earlier have to look westward for web hosting facilities.

He is not alone - recent months have seen a number of IDC initiatives spring up - in all nuances of the term - offering Indian companies a wide choice and some much needed competition in the web hosting business:

Much before IDCs made a physical appearance on Indian soil, the Chandigarh-based Pugmarks, since 1996 has enabled well over 5000 clients to establish a web presence, by establishing itself within the mother of all IDCs - the Chicago-based Exodus whose global infrastructure includes bandwidths from 622 MBPS to 155 MBPS.

Enron, the American company better known in India as a power generation player, aggressively entered the broadband connectivity business in the U.S. a few years ago. As a logical extension of its activities here, it created Broadband Solutions Pvt Ltd (BSPL) specifically to develop IDCs in six Indian cities. Mumbai, the first IDC will be followed by Bangalore,Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad. In total BSPL hopes to generate a 10,000 server-capacity in India, linked by a nationwide broadband network.

-From its India-base in Bangalore, Exatt Communications aims to be carve out its own niche as ``India's first full service provider (FSP)'' - which means a mix of both ISP and ASP, Internet and Application services. To this end Exatt is building a high speed all-fibre optic backbone linking 7 Indian metros ( Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad) directly to the US ( San Jose). It hopes to use this zippy infrastructure to offer its customers, features like ``hot potato'' routing - another graphic buzzword of today, which means, the fastest possible delivery of data packets.

Satyam Infoway the pioneer among Indian ISPs is broadening its appeal to the Indian web-savvy business community. It has set up an IDC at the International Infotech park in Vashi, housing over 250 server racks. It has the advantage of its own 50-city, 120 MBPS national network created for its ISP operations.

In most of these initiatives, the most 'happening' place is Mumbai - specifically New Mumbai or Vashi the township on the mainland, across the Thane Creek, which may soon rival Bangalore as the IT epicentre of India. Why Vashi? Because this is where the broadband pipes end, stupid.

The historical fact that VSNL, the nation's external telecom provider was Mumbai-based, ensured that most of the international bandwidth terminated there. It therefore made sound commercial sense to IDCs and other band-hungry IT merchants to put their mouths as close to the tap as possible.

But `Aamchi Mumbai' fans may not have it their own way for too long. The new international bandwidth is landing a good 1000 kms south on a small island off the Kerala city of Kochi. Just a week ago, the cable laying vessel ``Jan Steen'' arrived dragging a fibre optic cable all the way from the African coast - part of the South Africa Far East (SAFE) cable system owned by a consortium of 42 international telecom providers, that includes VSNL.

By May this year, this cable head will also be linked to the eastern leg that connects with Penang, Malaysia. It will immediately provide India - through VSNL - with 80 GB of additional bandwidth, expandable to 160 if need arises. That will make us part of a total system that runs 28,800 kms across the globe.

So, the bandwidth is there in place, and with aggressive IDCs setting up shop in India, Indian business has no more excuses to delay the day when their bricks will merge seamlessly with their clicks.

Anand Parthasarathy

* * *

Managing digital media

BARELY TWO years after he graduated from IIT Bombay and left for the Silicon shores of the U.S. Shailendra Jit Singh (all of 24 years old) is back - to launch what is being called 'India's first digital media innovation laboratory'.

In the intervening months he has founded Jalva Media in Burlingame, California, a company that specializes in making digital media manageable - and profitable - for its clients.

I recently asked Shailendra what all this mumbo jumbo jargon means. He was in India two weeks ago to launch the Mumbai labs of Jalva and took time off to explain to me over the telephone, that Jalva's mandate is to enable the deployment of rich audio and video content over multiple platforms - from streaming them on the Internet, or to wireless devices; broadcasting them digitally or sending them ``Direct To Home'' (DTH) by personal satellite antennas; or feeding them to interactive kiosks.

In other words, you as a content provider - a film producer, an ad. film maker, a web author or whatever - can concentrate on what you do best: generating the basic multimedia content and leave it to people like Jalva to give it a different spin for different delivery media.

They are digital spin doctors - in an entirely benign sense, unlike the political kind. To this end Jalva has tied up some canny partnerships: with Apple Inc., to officially provide Apple Quicktime encoding - the de facto standard for computer movie clips; with Sun Microsystems; and with BEA Weblogic to create ``Rich Media'' applications. In the new Indian ICE-Age where a combo of Information, Communication and Entertainment is widely believed to be a ``killer application'', a heady dose of Jalva and other up-and-coming niche companies may be just the thing to melt away the nagging problems of badly tooled or imperfectly converted multimedia content.

- AP

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