Indonesia’s government is in a unique position to take advantage of both introducing new data center and virtualization technology, as well as deploying a consolidated, distributed data center infrastructure that would bring the additional benefit of strong disaster recovery capabilities.
Much like the problems identified by Minister Tanner in Australia, today many Indonesian government organizations – and commercial companies – operate ICT infrastructure without structure or standards. “We cannot add additional services in our data center,” mentioned one IT manager interviewed recently in a data center audit. “If our users need additional applications, we direct them to buy their own server and plug it in under their desk. We don’t have the electricity in our data center to drive new applications and hardware, so our IT organization will now focus only on LAN/WAN connectivity.”
While all IT managers understand disaster recovery planning and business continuity is essential, few have brought DR from PowerPoint to reality, putting much organization data on individual servers, laptops, and desktop computers. All at risk for theft or loss/failure of single disk systems.
That is all changing. Commercial data centers are being built around the country by companies such as PT Indosat, PT Telekom, and other private companies. With the Palapa national fiber ring nearing completion, all main islands within the Indonesian archipelago are connected with diverse fiber optic backbone capacity, and additional international submarine cables are either planned or in progress to Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and other communication hubs.
For organizations currently supporting closet data centers, or local servers facing the public Internet for eCommerce or eGovernment applications, data centers such as the Cyber Tower in Jakarta offer both commercial data center space, as well as supporting interconnections for carriers – including the Indonesia Internet Exchange (IIX), in a similar model as One Wilshire, The Westin Building, or 151 Front in Toronto. Ample space for outsourcing data center infrastructure (particularly for companies with Internet-facing applications), as well as power, cooling, and management for internal infrastructure outsourcing.
The challenge, as with most other countries, is to convince ICT managers that it is in their company or organization’s interest to give up the server. Rather than focus their energy on issues such as “control,” “independence (or autonomous operations),” and avoiding the pain of “workforce retraining and reorganization,” ICT managers should consider the benefits outsourcing their physical infrastructure into a data center, and further consider the additional benefits of virtualization and public/enterprise cloud computing.
Companies such as VMWare, AGIT, and Oracle are offering cloud computing consulting and development in Indonesia, and the topic is rapidly gaining momentum in publications and discussions within both the professional IT community, as well as with CFOs and government planning agencies.
It makes sense. As in cloud computing initiatives being driven by the US and other governments, not only consolidating data centers, but also consolidating IT compute resources and storage, makes a lot of sense. Particularly if the government has difficulty standardizing or writing web services to share data. Add a distributed cloud processing model, where two or more data centers with cloud infrastructure are interconnected, and we can now start to drive down recovery time and point objectives close to zero.
Not just for government users, but a company located in Jakarta is able to develop a disaster recovery plan, simply backing up critical data in a remote location, such as IDC Batam (part of the IDC Indonesia group). As an example, the IDC Indonesia group operates 4 data centers located in geographically separate parts of the country, and all are interconnected.
While this does not support all zero recovery time objectives, it does allow companies to lease a cabinet or suite in a commercial data center, and at a minimum install disk systems adequate to meet their critical data restoral needs. It also opens up decent data center collocation space for emerging cloud service and infrastructure providers, all without the burden of legacy systems to refresh.
In a land of volcanoes, typhoons, earthquakes, and man-made disasters Indonesia has a special need for good disaster recovery planning. Through an effort to consolidate organization data centers, the introduction of cloud services in commercial and government markets, and high capacity interconnections between carriers and data centers, the basic elements needed to move forward in Indonesia are now in place.
source : http://cloudcomputing.ulitzer.com/
