A recent report by Cushman and Wakefield has indicated that India will be a $4.5 billion data center market by 2018 and will reach $7 billion by 2020, The market growth is driven by a number of factors including a rise in digital data traffic, public cloud services, and a higher expected growth for IoT enabled devices.
According to the same report, the size of the digital population in India presents a huge potential demand for data centre infrastructure. Digital data in India was around 40,000 petabytes in 2010; it is likely to shoot up to 2.3 million petabytes by 2020 — twice as fast as the global rate. If India houses all this data, it is likely to be the second-largest investment destination in the data centre market and the fifth-largest data centre market by 2050, as per the consultancy forecast.
Looking at the growth rate, data center players are trying to capture more market share by doubling up the total data center capacity in India. CtrlS – Asia’s largest Tier-4 datacenter player estimates the current data center capacity in the market to be close to 10.9 million square feet. The firm is now looking to add 5 million square feet (2 million square feet each in Mumbai and Hyderabad by 2020 and 1 million square feet in Chennai by 2021). From the current 1 million square feet, this will take up the firm’s capacity to 6 million by 2021.
Says Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Founder and CEO, CtrlS Datacenters Ltd, “CtrlS is investing in Hyperscale capacities and will soon emerge as the largest Tier-4 datacenter player globally with a cumulative footprint of 6 million square feet by 2021. We believe the impeding Indian personal data protection bill combined with explosion of data due to social media, cloud, e-commerce, digitization of data, Internet of Things (IoT), etc will require large capacities in India and we are gearing up address this opportunity”.
“As a Tier-4 datacenter, we provide near zero downtime data center facilities with an industry best uptime of 99.995% and industry lowest PUE of 1.36 helping customers save costs ranging anywhere between 20% to 30%. The new 5 million square feet datacenter facilities will be majorly powered by solar energy. This will not only reduce the carbon emissions but also ensure our datacenters are environment friendly. We are proud to double up the industry capacity and are committed to enable mission critical applications through our robust and secure data center facilities.”
B S Rao, Vice President, Marketing, CtrlS Datacenters Ltd, says, “It is our firm belief that we will be able to address the capacity requirements stemming from adoption of new technologies and data localization alike. CtrlS is now emerging to be the world’s largest Tier-4 Datacenter without doubt. And with a cumulative footprint of six million square feet we will the largest datacenter player in the country. The unique differentiation we offer at CtrlS is that we are a Tier-4 data center provider offering near zero downtime with an uptime SLA of 99.995% and cost reduction in power ranging anywhere between 20% to 40%, besides providing facilities which are carrier neutral, quake resistant and (air) pollution free. Today, CtrlS powers leading telecom, banking, financial services, manufacturing, e-commerce, media, IT/ITeS companies including 20 of the Fortune 100 Global Multinationals who host their mission critical applications and infrastructure that require seamless availability.”
Moreover, due to country capacity constraints in Hong Kong, Singapore and uneasiness in south China sea combined with tariff wars, many business are moving out of china and seeking alternate destinations. It is likely that India will emerge as the most preferred destination for datacenter outsourcing in the south east Asian region. This apart, once the impending data localization bill is passed by the India Government, majority of the business – both overseas and local that are hosting data outside the country will need to comply and host the data locally, this will lead to large consumption of datacenter space in the country and hence Ctrl’S plan to double up the industry footprint appears to be well timed.
