Google is considering setting up a caching, or mirror, server in India which will enable the internet major to throw up search results quicker and YouTube videos to load faster in the country which is going through a data explosion, thanks to surging smartphone sales.
The US search giant has had initial discussions with fibre manufacturer Sterlite Technologies to co-locate the servers wherever the Indian company’s fibre network is being created, Anand Agarwal, chief executive of the Vedanta Group company, told ET.
“Google is high in search and high on videos and the fibre infrastructure is going to be very critical for videos from the bandwidth perspective and for search for the latency perspective,” Agarwal said. “It would bring down costs as well.” A cache server is a dedicated network server that saves Web pages and other Internet content locally.
By placing previously requested information in temporary storage, or cache, the server both speeds up access to data and reduces demand on an enterprise’s bandwidth. “If you have caching or mirror servers nearby, instead of in the US, then the time becomes faster and you are using less bandwidth,” Agarwal said.
Sterlite, a fibre manufacturer and fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) provider, has around 200,000 homes connected to its network in six cities. The fibre network is being used by telecom service providers (TSP) including Airtel, Tata Teleservices and Idea, apart from internet service providers (ISP) such as Spectranet, on a fixed and revenue share model. “Going forward, Google would have caching servers that can be co-located wherever our network gets created,” Agarwal said. He added that Google’s strategy is different in India than in the US, as it wants to enable a faster reach of Google services to the subscriber. “They continue to be a content provider, while the content rides on somebody else’s network.”
Google India declined to comment.
The company currently caters to the Asian market through its data centres in Taiwan and Singapore with the help of its other centres in the US and Europe.
Naveen Mishra, research director at Gartner, said that one of the benefits, especially by putting up a cache server is clearly an improvement in customer performance and reducing latency. “I see cache server as a stepping stone for bigger investment coming from Google and that could be really in the form of local data centers. Eventually, I would not be surprised if Google sets up its complete data centre in India,” Mishra said.
Analysts say that Google experience happens only when search comes back in micro seconds and for that end user needs to be connected with a high-speed server. Agarwal said that the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook would be creating data centers as well as caching servers in India to offer seamless and speedy services to their users.
Google already has a multi-tiered content delivery platform that reaches more than 100 countries. The platform leverages its extensive global network infrastructure, which interconnects Google’s data centers and backbone to our edge points of presence (POPs) across the globe.
