ESDS to be a catalyst in helping customers go digital

Dr. Rajeev Papneja – COO, EVP, ESDS in a chat with VARINDIA explains the role the company has been playing in the datacenter space through its software defined storage offering, besides recounting its plans for the IoT & managed service platforms and the projects it has bagged in the smart city space -    

With the surge in data volumes, current datacenter space available in India would have got occupied at an unexpected rate with servers, if it would not have been for the acceptance of Cloud Technology. Traditionally, increase in data simply transformed into buying more enterprise storage and manipulating the combination of SATA & SSD drives and having some form of database clustering in place. The model doesn’t work in today’s world because it is not about the storage capacity and cache data anymore, but it is about the IOPS requirements. 

“ESDS for instance saw an unexpected move of critical systems to the Cloud, especially SAP HANA/S4, by large enterprises. Out of the many challenges, the decision of architecture and selections at storage layer play a very crucial role. Having traditional dedicated SAN storage became a bottleneck, when customers on public cloud started demanding heavy IOPS. At the same time, it does not provide the flexibility of borrowing resources from other SAN. With the move of mission critical systems such as SAP HANA and online businesses to public cloud, the architecture has to be redefined at the storage layer for providing the required performance with High Availability and all this at a cost which is affordable and competitive,” explains Dr. Rajeev Papneja – COO, EVP, ESDS.

ESDS deploys Software Defined Storage cluster solutions supporting scale-out SAN that helped the company to deliver extreme performance coupled with great flexibility, scalability and enterprise grade data protection and a business module to pay only for the consumed services. It has connected its Nashik and Mumbai Datacenters with the connectivity required to move virtual machines between the two datacenters in near real-time and deployed Software Defined Networking to facilitate it. 

Digitization plans for 2017…

ESDS is presently working on IoT platform that will be powered by eNlight Cloud. The platform in currently in Beta stage. “We are coming up with a platform that will not only be device agnostic but also data format agnostic. IoT is an integral component of the whole digital disruption. We are working to understand various customer expectations and are in regular discussions with the CIOs in the industry to come up with that last piece besides Cloud and IoT that completes the picture. We see people still confused between Digitization and Digital Transformation. Similar to the efforts we had put in starting from year 2011 to facilitate adoption of public cloud, we will be doing the same to facilitate digital transformation. Enterprises will also need to change their mindset of working with any one giant service provider as digital transformation would require involvement of many vendors as part of the eco-system. Choosing right partners will decide the fate of the digitization projects taken up,” says Dr Rajeev.

ESDS has also bagged the Cloud Service Provider contract for Pune Smart City. The company will continue to focus on working in majority of the Smart City initiatives this year. “With the “Make in India” initiative, we are the cloud provider in the nation that has its own cloud indigenously developed by its CMMI level 3 appraised dedicated R&D team. We are able to provide the most optimal use of resources combined with better pricing. We have introduced a unique concept of vertical auto-scaling that is patented by the US Patent & Trademark Office and have introduced the concept of pay-per-consumption in contrast to the pay-per-use billing which is a common practice in the industry,” cites Dr Rajeev.

Managed services will also remain one of its key differentiators in the industry with the experience of serving more than 35, 000 clients from all over the globe for over a decade. It is already looking at Artificial Intelligence platforms that can provide a seamless experience to its customers for first level of communication. This will help the company to utilize more technical people to become experts in real technology issues thereby providing better support to its customers.
“We anticipate a huge demand in managed services due to the skill gap between the pace at which technology is getting adapted and the speed at which the skilled talent is getting ready,” sums up Dr Rajeev.

Top Technologies for ESDS in 2017 

Use of dockers: With the enterprises moving to cloud and running hundreds of Virtual Machines, use of dockers have started to make lot of sense. There is no point in putting in dollars on guest operating system for hundreds of VM’s and also wasting compute resources to run these guest operating systems. There are some challenges related to security but similar to adoption of cloud, the concept of containers would be accepted very soon. 

Driving AI: Being in the field of providing managed services, ESDS is starting to look at Artificial Intelligence platforms that can provide a seamless experience to its customers for first level of communication. This will help the company to utilize more technical people to become experts in real technology issues thereby providing better support to customers. 

IoT: ESDS is also working on its own IoT platform that would assist with automation of many activities in Datacenter and would reduce monitoring efforts.