Data centers are supposed to be boring. You couldn’t have picked a more uninspired combination of words to describe the place that essentially contains the beating heart of most internet companies. Just search for it online, and you’ll find pictures of sterile rooms housing rows and rows of blinking black CPU towers with the aesthetics of a hospital. The first was that a lot of people work really hard to make it sound boring. The people who run data centres aren’t the attention-seeking type. I found out that Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft aren’t exactly providers of data centres in India; they are customers. They lease capacity from players like Sify Technologies, CtrlS Datacentres, and Netmagic. Yes, that is Sify. Most people over the age of 35 probably think that Sify is dead, and almost everyone below 35 has no idea what Sify is. Building a data center is a big commitment, it as a ‘quagmire’ in his story. Apparently, it can take up to 60 clearances from different government agencies, and some of the few people who know how to navigate it include the realtor Hiranandani Group and conglomerates Adani Group and Reliance Industries. Well, until now. That’s the second thing I came to know. It turns out that AWS and Microsoft are building massive data centres on their own. In places like Hyderabad, Pune, and Mumbai. Their reasoning is simple: why buy when you can build? Especially when it can bring down their bills by as much as 50%. This makes sense, but it raises some important questions. What’ll happen to everyone else? What will the local data-centre operators do if AWS and Microsoft build their own data centres? How will they replace their biggest customers? And who is most at risk? That’s the third thing I learnt. It’s also the most interesting part of our today's story only at www.multimediastudio.net
