Hughes third data centre goes operational

Mumbai: Network service provider Hughes, today announced that it has set-up its third state-of-the-art internet data centre in India at Mumbai. The data centre will offer services like hosting, collocation, internet, mailing and spam protection to customers and will be the companies third domestic Internet gateway in India.

Hughes Escorts Communications Ltd., HECL is a joint venture between Hughes Network Systems (HNS) and Escorts Ltd.

"The need for protecting data and creating geographic redundancies has been amply demonstrated during the recent Mumbai rains. Hughes is India's only VSAT and Terrestrial VPN service provider which has three data centres in separate seismic regions (Bangalore, Gurgaon and Mumbai), giving greater flexibility and high uptime and availability of data to our customers, says Amit Tripathi, senior VP, enterprise, Hughes India.

The company has also announced that has signed Lupin Pharma as its first customer for the Mumbai data centre. Speaking on the occasion, Milind Dhupkar, GM - IT, Lupin said, "Organisations have to break out of the myth that their networks are immune to disaster and proactively plan to ensure business continuity in this age of demanding consumers."

The HECL Data Centres in Gurgaon, Mumbai and Bangalore have been interconnected to each other over HECL's multi-telco backbone in order to act as back up sites for each other in case of any such emergency.

According to a Nasscom-KPMG study condcted in 2004, around 60 per cent of the respondents had their backup storage less than 40km away from the primary site while 27 per cent had it more than 40 km away. 62 per cent of the respondents had alternate recovery site options (co-operative arrangements). Given the recent natural calamities that have hit the country in the recent past, these dynamics are bound to change with more and more companies looking for geographic diversification for greater risk mitigation.