Hyderabad-based data centre provider CtrlS Datacenters is all set to pump in additional ₹2,000 crores to set up three new data centres.
The new data centres in Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai would cater to the increasing data localisation demand from the government.
“We are in the process of completing our second Mumbai data centre, which will be completed by April. Once that’s done, we’ll set up our over one million sq ft first hyper-scale data centre with 100MW power capacity,” BS Rao, VP-marketing at CtrlS Datacenters, told BusinessLine.
Apart from the Mumbai data centre, the company is also planning a larger 150 MW data centre in Hyderabad which will commence operations by 2020. Another data centre with 70MW capacity will subsequently be set up in Chennai.
“A 40,000 sq ft data centre can cost anywhere between ₹70-90 crore. A 300,000-400,000 sq ft data centre costs anywhere between ₹150-200 crore. Our million sq. ft data centres will, therefore, cost a lot more. We’ll be investing at least ₹2,000 crores over the next 2-3 years on all the three data centres combined,” Rao said.
Rao said the spike in demand from large internet companies is turning India into a cloud data centre hub. Moreover, with the government asking companies to localise data, demand for data centres in the country has accelerated.
While internet companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM claim to have their own data centres in India, these global giants in fact lease out space in the data centres of companies such as CtrlS, Netmagic and Sify.
Cloud-first strategy
Data centre infrastructure hardware enterprise spending in India is on pace to touch $2.7 billion in 2018, a 2.6 per cent increase from 2017, according to market research firm Gartner.
According to Gartner, most organisations today have a cloud-first strategy, and new business applications are most likely to be developed and hosted using public cloud services. In addition, the availability of hyper-scale data centres such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in India, as well as local providers ramping up to provide public cloud services, have become compelling reasons for Indian organisations to move toward Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Spending on IaaS in India is set to reach $1 billion in 2018, up 45.5 per cent year over year.
Another notable trend as per Gartner is an increase in the number of migrations of on-premises office suites to software as a service-based offering, such as Google G Suite and Microsoft Office 365. Indian businesses are expected to spend close to $275 million on cloud office suites in 2018, a 37 per cent increase year over year.
“Whether it is a credit card, telecom, banking or social media data, it will soon become mandatory to host them in India. In anticipation of such a development, most MNCs are making efforts to set up data centres in India. All these large players are buying capacity for the next 5-10 years,” Rao said.
Rao added that the new Mumbai data centre will come up in the suburbs of Mahape where the company has already acquired seven acres. The company has also acquired a large land parcel in Hyderabad and is now scouting for land in Chennai to set up the new data centre there.
