30 Minute Interview

“We have grown from non-IP to IP, and expanded our product portfolio to include power management at the rack level”

Dr Ching-I Hsu, Chairman and CEO, Raritan talked to Nivedan Prakash about the latest advances in KVM technology and the market for infrastructure management services

Dr Ching-I Hsu

It’s almost 10 years since you set up operations in India. How has the IT infrastructure market evolved in all these years?

As a country, India has always been aware of new technologies but in terms of adoption it has been a cycle behind the West. However, this gap is decreasing as we begin to adopt technologies early on.

As an organization we have grown from non-IP to IP and expanded our product portfolio to include power management at the rack level.

How is the global market revolving around the infrastructure management services? Where does the Indian market stand as of now? Do you see a surge in the demand for your services and products here in India?

According to IDC, the number of servers in the US will jump 50% during the next four years. By 2010, the total number of servers in the US is expected to grow to 15.8 million, located in 7,000 data centers nationwide the biggest of which currently contains as many as 80,000 servers each. Additionally, rising energy costs of running a data center are gaining more attention, as they are already in the range of $3.3 billion annually, according to IDC.

Raritan is in the power management space. In recent times, this space has been growing rapidly. What has been interesting to note is that the behavior concerning power consumption has begun to change. There is greater awareness about increased consumption of power in the data center. The increasing power demands on today’s higher-density computing environments are creating demand for a variety of power management solutions.

India too is set to witness phenomenal growth in data centers and power arguably is the most important resource here. Over the past few years, IT infrastructure in India has grown exponentially. With major companies setting up their operation centres in the country, it has led to an increase in the number of server farms and data centres. With the growth in infrastructure comes an increase in demand for power; such a scenario calls for efficient power conditioning solutions.

It is here that organizations such as ours look to seize the opportunity by offering power solutions that are designed to help IT administrators and facilitate managers in improving uptime, making capacity planning decisions, efficiently utilizing energy in ways that save power and money and taking steps towards green computing. Our products are definitely in-demand within the Indian enterprise.

Since India is witnessing a boom in the data center deployment, what kind of opportunities does it bring to companies like Raritan?

This presents us with opportunities both for our access and power management tools. While the market is aware about KVM-over-IP, we are still in the process of educating this growing market about our power management tools. It will, therefore, be a while before we actually seize on the opportunities.

As a power management solution provider, how do you help and facilitate IT administrators and managers in improving uptime, making capacity planning decisions, and efficiently utilizing energy?

Raritan’s intelligent PDU is the only tool that can measure power at IT-device level. With this benefit, data center managers can understand if they have the power capacity for more IT equipment or they have enough power for current equipment. Data center managers can also locate devices that are taking space drawing idle power.

Tell us about your foray into the ‘asset management’ domain? How can your solution help your customers in managing their data centers?

Our foray into the asset management domain is through our offering ‘dcTrack’. With the deployment of ‘dcTrack’, users can maintain an accurate, real-time views of data center servers, blades, virtual servers, applications, data networks, IP addressing space, and cabling.

In addition, up-to-the-minute views of data centre power consumption, heat dissipation, raised floor space and rack elevations can be provided. Meanwhile, ‘dcTrack’ is available in our US and European markets.

Being considered as one of the fathers of KVM technology, could you share some of the latest advances in this technology with us?

When we began our journey in this space, our first buyer was Intel. Since then we have come a long way. Today our customers around the world are talking to us about newer ways of simplifying their tasks. With the Internet exploding and driving the creation of ever-larger data centers, network administrators are demanding KVM systems that are designed to manage growth.

Today’s KVM management products are more refined than what was available in the past. With today’s KVM switches, users can control multiple servers from a single keyboard, video monitor and mouse connection in contrast to traditional KVM devices that required servers to be cabled directly to the device. The new digital KVM switches enable users to control servers remotely over a simple IP network allowing administrators to monitor and manage servers even from the comfort of their own living room.

Our innovations are in the areas of data center energy management through a single central console; infrastructure management solution that helps visualize and automate the tracking and management of IT and facility systems. Smart card-authentication is another that enables card readers to be placed where they are most convenient to IT administrators, including outside the data center—this new solution works with smart card readers that support widely deployed smart cards, including the US government’s Common Access Cards (CAC) and Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards. These are some of our recent offerings to our customers.