Linode to expand cloud-centre capacity in India
An alternative to the big cloud providers, Linode is tripling its data-centre capacity in India.
Cloud computing company Linode is expanding its data centre operations in India, as it looks to leverage the growing demand for compute and storage infrastructure in the Asian markets.
The company plans to triple its capacity to be able to sustain its plans on customer growth and service offerings through 2023, the company said in a statement. India is one of 11 data centre regions the alternate cloud provider has.
The expansion follows the company’s unprecedented customer growth in the region, which doubled throughout the pandemic. “The demand surge resulted in surplus capacity being filled in less than half the time Linode had predicted,” the company said.
With the expansion, Linode also plans to hire in India soon, Blair Lyon, Vice President of Cloud Experience, Linode told EnterpriseStory, but did not give details about the plan.
Through the expansion of its data centre capacity in Mumbai, Linode plans to leverage the growing demand for cloud infrastructure in the market. The US-based company expects India to become the Research and Development (R&D) arm for the region, Lyon told EnterpriseStory. At present, the R&D centre in India manages data centres throughout Europe and Asia.
India is the second-largest and fastest-growing cloud services market in the Asia market, following China, according to Gartner.
“There is a lot of need to go virtual, whether it is with virtual work or other kinds of streaming media and streaming content,” Lyon said, of the demand in the region.
With the increasing shift to digital in the country, the demand accelerated tremendously, he added.
Enterprises found it difficult to find their own hardware, and scale it quickly to respond to the surge in demand. “Supply chains were so disrupted during the pandemic, that it was very difficult to scale your own infrastructure,” he added.
Another big concern for small businesses is the need for experts in managing the infrastructure. “Every company needs to have some sort of internet capability or digital capability. They are now tapping into a workforce that knows how to do those things,” Lyon said.
“Unfortunately, there aren't enough of them out there to satisfy all of the demands. Engineers and developers, and operational experts who understand how to manage infrastructure at scale, and how to do it, are in very, very, short supply,” he added.
That’s where alternate cloud providers like Linode come in. The company provides cost-efficient, core cloud-computing services for small and medium businesses “to support their rapid shift to digital-first business models and look to us to give them an alternative to the complexity and cost of larger hyperscale providers.”
While big cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure provide a lot of applications and functionalities, Linode bundles a lot of the core features that would be useful for small businesses. This helps it to bring the price down by half or more than that of AWS, which offers greater scale and greater number of services.
Edited by Kunal Talgeri