Indian data centre providers are sprucing up capacity, banking on the rebounding economy, growth in e-governance and expected data residency norms.
The investments in data centres - facilities that house computer systems and store data - are occurring in both captive (firms setting up centres for their own use) and third-party (outsourced).
“During the last 2-3 years, there have been a lot of investments in national e-governance projects and this has led to an increase in demand of data centres,” Nasscom Vice-President Rama Vedashree said, adding that investments are coming in for both greenfield (new) and brownfield (existing) and traditional IT firms.
Growing demand
According to Nasscom, India’s data centre market was at about $2.2 billion in 2012. It is estimated to grow by more than 8 per cent over the next 3-4 years.
Tulip Telecom is planning to set up large data centres in Delhi and Mumbai over the next three years, even though it is yet to take a call on the capacity hike, its Executive Director Deepinder Singh Bedi said.
The company has about one million sq ft of space across Delhi, Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata, with a total raised floor space of 5 lakh sq ft.
“The demand for data centre space is from IT and IT-enabled service firms, banking and financial services sector, telecom companies, Internet service providers and consumer goods firms,” K.K. Shetty, Director, India & SAARC (Enterprise & Telecom Networks) at TE Connectivity, said.
The connectivity solutions provider has already setup about eight data centres for the Government sector.
Sify Technologies is another firm looking to increase data centre capacity. The company, which has been investing about 40 per cent of its total spend to build capacity since FY’08, has close to nine lakh sq ft of space. The Software Technology Parks of India is setting up a 10,000-sq ft space data centre in Hyderabad for small and medium enterprises.
The current data centre space available is India is about 3.7 million sq ft as of 2012-end. This is estimated to rise to 6.3 million sq ft by 2017, said Naresh Singh, Principal Research Analyst with Gartner.
CtrlS, Hyderabad-based data centre services provider, would add another 5,500 racks in the next 8–12 months across Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai. It has a present capacity of about 6,500 racks in Hyderabad and Mumbai.
“Data centre capacity is concentrated across certain cities such as Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad, while growth is now coming in from Delhi and other cities. There is dearth in some cities, overcapacity in certain other cities,” said KPMG India Partner Akhilesh Tuteja.
Regulators’ plan
With regulators such as Reserve Bank of India planning to make it mandatory for data to reside within the geographic boundaries of the country, the demand for space would only grow increase further. And data centre players are well aware of this.