Spread over 8.2 lakh sq.ft., Yotta Infrastructure by Hiranandani Group will have a capacity of 7,200 racks. The company is aiming for an Uptime of Tier-IV facility. The company’s blueprint suggests 11 buildings in total with a combined capacity of 60,000 racks and 500 MW of Power with capability to provide services i.e. managed IT services, connectivity, security, hybrid multi-cloud, and data center build services.
What are the factors that have led to this massive surge in the Indian DC market?
There’s data explosion happening like never before, and it is only going to increase in the near future. Enterprises are adopting cloud-only models, consumers are increasingly consuming online content and government’s push to digitisation are all factors leading to demand for scalable data centers. A report by datacentremap says that India has around 540 million active internet users but has an abnormally low data center capacity of less than 700 MW capacity. There is a huge business opportunity in India’s DC market and we are already witnessing the entry of large global and Indian companies in this space.
The rate at which data is exploding would need unlimited scalability accompanied with scalable power infrastructure. Yotta is the first data center player to introduce data center parks spread over 50 acres.”
Sunil Gupta, Managing Partner & CEO, Yotta Infrastructure
What has led you to expand your operations to the Indian DC Market?
Data growth in India has increased manifold due to the emergence of new technologies, internet and smartphone penetration, enterprise digitisation and data localisation norms. Hence, to manage all the data that’s created, there is a burgeoning demand for highly scalable data centers in the country. Industry reports suggest that there’s a huge gap in the data center infrastructure in India and the corresponding data storage needs. The country currently requires developing 15 times more data center capacity to address the ever-increasing data storage needs of digital India. The Hiranandani Group identified this gap and being one of the largest real estate players in the country, they own the required resources –land banks, construction, power generation and distribution, to foray into the DC space, and launched Yotta Infrastructure in July.
What is your strategy as you venture into the Indian DC market?
Normally premium services come at premium prices. Our strategy is to challenge this notion by offering the highest quality at the lowest price. And we can do this by leveraging our economies of scale since we own our land assets, construction and power distribution. Currently, our team is working towards launching the first data center building in our data center park in Panvel. Spread over 8.2 lakh sq.ft., it will have a capacity of 7,200 racks and will be almost 45% bigger than the largest data center in India. We are aiming for an Uptime Institute certified Tier-IV facility. We would also be providing a suite of data center services such as managed IT services, connectivity, security, hybrid multi-cloud, and data center build services to our customers. Over the next couple of years, we plan to build five such buildings in Navi Mumbai, two in Mumbai and four in Chennai. Our blueprint talks about 11 buildings in total with a combined capacity of 60,000 racks and 500 MW of Power.
Given that the Indian Data center market already has a good number of players, how do you plan to differentiate yourself from the long-established competition?
I have been working in the Data Center industry for over 27 years, and having worked with multiple players in the past, I realised that the rate at which data is exploding would need unlimited scalability accompanied with scalable power infrastructure. Yotta is the first data center player to introduce data center parks spread over 50 acres.
By utilizing the amenities from our group company, we have been able to come up with a cost-effective proposition for our customers. We are also the first and only Indian data center company with a captive solar power plant. 30 per cent of the power consumption in our Panvel data center will be generated in an eco-friendly environment from a 279-acre solar power plant near Goa. These reduced costs will be also be transferred to our end customers. Along with this, we will build hyper-density, hyper-scalable Uptime Institute Certified Tier 4 data centre and provide co-location solutions to enterprises.
What is the investment you are working with and by when do you expect to be ready with the infrastructure?
We are a 100% subsidiary of the Hiranandani Group. The plan is to invest INR 15,000 crores over the next 5-7 years to set up data centers at prime locations across the country. The first building at Hiranandani Fortune City in Panvel is scheduled to go live by end of December 2019.
How will your data centres be powered?
The most prominent source for power generation is thermal energy but it is not environment friendly. Being an environmentally aware brand, we wanted to reduce the impact while still maintaining efficiency. Our data center in Panvel will use solar power to satiate 30 per cent of our power requirements generated by another group company.
