Reliance Infocomm Limited

Relying on the right services

Today most businesses require specialised IT services, which can be fairly expensive to set up. In such situations, outsourcing IT services may be the ideal option, considering that today’s IDCs provide such extensive services. by Deepali Gupta

Reliance Infocomm Limited (RIL) claims to be India's largest Internet Data Centre (IDC) service provider. It hosts business critical applications of Indian and foreign blue chip companies, financial institutions and other important organizations. Reliance IDCs are Level 3 facilities spanning more than 2,00,000 sqft. of hosting space. Two IDCs - 35,000 sqft. (IDC1) and 100,000 sq. ft. (IDC2)), are at Mumbai and two of 20,000 sq. ft. (IDC1) and 50,000 sqft. (IDC2) are functioning at Bangalore. RIL plans to set up data centers in four other major cities in India (Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi, Kolkata) totalling over 5,00,000 sqft. of hosting space that will be available in the coming year.

RIL’s IDCs offer a range of standard and advanced managed hosting services. The services range from offering bulk colocation to fully managed hosting of servers on a rental model. Further, a whole range of managed value-added services are offered like firewall, intrusion detection, backup, streaming, mai-ling, system administration, data base administration, load balanc-ing, storage services and Disaster Recovery (DR)/ BCP solutions.

The company takes pride in its Integrated Telecom and Data Centre Operations for management, hosting and delivery of end to end application infrastructure services.

Managed Services

The aim of the Reliance IDC is to deliver innovative and flexible data solutions to its customers with foolproof processes and systems while ensuring the highest uptime and availability.

The company offers services like utility computing and servers on a rental model on a fully managed basis.

The managed services include:

Managed Media & Streaming Services: Instant delivery of live and on-demand audio, video, and other forms of multimedia content over the Internet or over a corporate intranet. Customer can choose the number of streams and speed, with unlimited data transfer.

Shared Database: For customers looking at hosting database-driven websites running on high-end infrastructure, Reliance Shared Database Services offer good infrastructure, flexibility, and scalability.

Managed Mailing Services: Reliance Business Mailing is a Shared Mail Service, offering an Open Standards Based Mailing platform.

Managed Security Services: This offers protection for online business operations. It is a business necessity, driven both by market dynamics and aggressive regulatory require-ments. Organisations, large and small, require a security solution that delivers protection with a lower total cost of ownership. A team of security experts guards the hosted IT infrastructure round the clock.

Managed System and Database Administration: To ensure complete System Administration and Database Administration support across various technologies and platforms, a team of professionals takes care of the day-to-day administration of servers and applications.

Managed Load Balancing Services: Reliance Server Load Balancing (RSLB) service distributes load across a group of servers hosted at its data centre and running a common website or application (or set of applications), in such a way that traffic is directed to the least loaded and most responsive Web server.

Managed Backup Services: Reliance's suite of Managed Backup Solutions include data backup and restore on a fully automated tape backup library as well as complete database backup

Managed Storage Services: This helps Enterprise IT managers lower data & storage costs over a period of time. The IDC manages enterprise data storage entirely and offers a compelling value proposition through local SAN services and high-availability SAN services.

Managed Disaster Recovery Services: These services comprise Disaster Recovery solutions and services for hosted IT Infrastructure. Each Reliance IDC is connected to the other through redundant links to facilitate disaster recovery.

Managed Monitoring and Reporting Services: Tools for round-the-clock monitoring of performance, operability and capacity of customers' websites, servers and mission critical applications are available. So, the diagnosis of problems and prediction of potential problems can be done accurately and pre-emptive and corrective actions can be taken.

Connectivity Infrastructure

Located in seismically stable zones in Reliance's own premises with multiple layers of physical and electronic security (including biometric access and 24*7 CCTV recording), the data centres are secure areas.

High redundant power supply right from source level grids to power distribution units, DG sets, UPS sets and batteries ensure power uptimes of 99.999%. Stringent fire detection systems (including an early warning system) and fire suppressions systems (based on eco-friendly FM200 gas) are in place. Precision air-conditioning systems ensure standard temperature, humidity levels and filter out any harmful gases and dust particles. All facility infrastructure is monitored and controlled centrally through a building management system.

The IDCs, are connected to 132 countries across four continents spanning the US, UK, Middle-east, and Asia-Pacific through Flag Telecom’s backbone (A Reliance Infocomm group company) and other undersea cable systems like Se-Me-Wea-3 and i2i and have public or private peering relationship with large Tier 1 ISPs and content providers at more than 15 Internet Exchange points across the globe. RIL also shares peering relationships with other popular domestic ISPs on STM-1 bandwidth levels.

The data centres are connected to Reliance's countrywide optic fibre based IP network with terabytes of capacity having points of presence at more than 1,100 cities. Indian offices of global customers can access the content hosted at the IDCs by connecting to any of these 1,100 PoPs using multiple means like local dedicated leased lines, PSTN - ISDN dialup links or over the Reliance's 3G CDMA mobile services. What this means is that potential users across the world can access the content hosted at Reliance Data Centers with a minimal number of hops, minimal latency, minimal loss of packets and higher speeds.

The IDCs at Mumbai and Bangalore are interconnected through redundant fibre rings with bandwidth capacity of STM-4 for data replication and DR services.

The Reliance Philosophy

Reliance claims to have a unique approach to their business when it comes to accepting clients for the IDC. Its primary goal according to Sunil Gupta, Head Product, Management & Marketing—Data Centre Services, RIL is to understand the macro IT and telecom requirements of customers instead of just offering a small component, which may

not cater to all the requirements of a customer. "We offer a complete consultation on possible solutions and then multiple business units working under RIL act cohesively as a partner with the customer to implement a phase-wise time bound solution," he says.

Deepali Gupta can be reached at: deepali@networkmagazineindia.com