Reliance Communications is in the midst of constructing a 4.50-lakh sqft data centre at its headquarters in Navi Mumbai.
A data centre is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components such as telecommunications and storage systems. It would be the largest facility in the country and increase the company’s total space to 11 lakh sqft.
“We are actually moving from being only a co-location partner to an end-to-end managed services provider and also setting up public cloud. This data centre is not only to service customers in India but also for offshore clients,” said RCom Chief Executive Officer (India Enterprise) Deepak Khanna.
In India, data centre operators mostly provide co-location services and offering managed services is a move up the value chain, Khanna added.
The latest facility – International Data Centre 5 (IDC-5) – will be housed at the Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City in Navi Mumbai.
IDC-5 will also help RCom win more international customers with the firm also owning and operating submarine cables with landing stations across the globe.
RCom, controlled by billionaire Anil Ambani, already has five data centres in Mumbai, two in Bangalore and one each in Chennai and Hyderabad.
Lion’s share “All our existing data centres are running at 90 per cent capacity,” Khanna said, adding that captive use is a miniscule 2-3 per cent capacity. The lion’s share usage is by third-party companies.
According to industry experts, the total data centre facility available in India would be about 45-50 lakh sqft, led by players such as Tata Communications, Netmagic, CtrlS and Sify.
Khanna, however, did not reveal the investments required for IDC-5 or the name of the firms RCom was in talks to rope in as customers.
It expects to win all the top Indian corporates, besides banks and government departments as customers.