As the globe spins into an era where massive digitalization is a welcome reality, it has called for setting up of massive hyperscale data centers and the epicentre of activities is becoming APAC region. PDG’s strategy is definitely well thought out.
“By default, we have a lot of specifications in our data center that easily works for our customers.”
Vipin Shirsat, General Manager, India, Princeton Digital Group (PDG)
In the language of the CEO of Princeton Digital Group (PDG), Rangu Salgame, APAC is going to see a revolution of Data Centers for three simple reasons. For example, acceleration of cloud since the pandemic is one of the reasons along with e-commerce in all the markets in Asia. From the cloud perspective a lot of adoption is happening in the large organizations along with the government and public sectors. As per him, even though the cloud adoption is aggressive but still the region is at a very nascent stage. So fast forward in next 10 -15 years a lot of aggression would happen in the cloud adoption, and it will propel the consumption of the Data Center capacity. E-commerce is going at a doble digit pace which requires a large-scale digital infrastructure. The region is having more than 3 billion people and they continue to use smartphones to drive e-commerce business. Apart from this, digital content is being consumed by these smart phones among the 3 billion people which is another factor to propel the data centers and co-location space.
Keeping the growth trajectory, global data center companies like Digital Realty, Princeton Digital Group (PDG) and Equinix have made massive invest in the region.
India being one of the hot beds for data centers because of its massive digital drive along with thrust on infrastructure development, government have brought out data center policy thereby boosting the growth in the data centers. We see cloud providers such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon have expanded their network of the facilities in the country. Indian companies including Yotta, Reliance Data Center and AdaniConneX entered the market last year apart from the expansion of the existing companies including CTRLs, NTT, Web Werks, Nxtra, etc.
India has 138 data centers built across 11 million square feet of area and has 737 MW of IT capacity. Mumbai and Chennai alone account for 57% of this capacity. Independent study says that 45 more data centers spanning 13 million square feet and 1,015 MW of IT capacity will be ready by the end of 2025.
At the fag end of 2022, PDG launched its MU1 data center in Mumbai. The beauty of the company is its commitment to the business as the MU1 DC got completed within a record time of 20 months from the day of its announcement.
This is a 48MW of IT capacity across two buildings span across roughly six acres within a larger IT campus at Airoli, Navi Mumbai.
As per the company statement, MU1 will be powered up to 40% by renewable energy and will operate on minimal water consumption. In addition, the facility is the first Open Compute Project (OCP) certified data center in the country and will also be Uptime Tier III certified. The total cost incurred to set up this facility goes up to $300 million.
Established in 2017, Singapore-headquartered PDG is a market leader in Asia’s hyperscale data center market with presence in five countries with a portfolio of 20 data centers and 600 MW capacity. The company is backed by blue-chip institutional investment firms like Warburg Pincus, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP) and Mubadala Investment Company (Mubadala).
PDG develops and operates data center infrastructure in the dynamic digital economies of Asia including China, Singapore, India, Indonesia, and Japan. With 20 data centers in 14 cities across 5 countries and counting, it unleashes the growth potential of global hyperscalers and enterprises.
The PDG leadership team is made up of industry veterans from the global telecommunication, internet infrastructure, data center, and real estate sectors. Its strong platform leadership is complemented by deep in-country teams. Its unique three-pronged investment strategy of acquisition, development and carve-outs supports its mission to bring scale with speed to market to Asia’s most dynamic regions.
We spoke to Vipin Shirsat, General Manager, India, Princeton Digital Group (PDG) to understand how PDG is relevant to the Indian customers who are hungry adopt digital transformation.
With over 10 years of deep experience in the DC industry, Vipin has driven exceptional growth by working closely with the global hyperscalers and internet companies.
In exclusive chat with Enterprise IT World, Vipin reveals the uniqueness of his company’s offerings; the challenges faced by the CIO community and how PDG is acting as a catalyst to solve those challenges.
Interview
How are you mitigating the CIO challenges of taking workload to cloud vis-à-vis keeping it in co-locations infrastructure?
People are trying to figure out what is the best way. Traditional way is to put your servers inside your office. Today there are options to put into the third-party servers like ours or take some load onto the cloud. I think this is a constant decision making of every CIO in terms of what do I put in cloud and what do I put in the third-party servers or on-premises. I think a lot of CIOs are thinking that having something on premise is not the best solution. Of course, there are exceptions to this statement. The reason for that is to manage the size of some capacity, which outgrows in a couple of months. Secondly, as applications are becoming complicated, the need for uptime is becoming higher and higher. Just one data center is not enough. You need a DR. You need a DC along with a near DC and DR and a permutation and combination in these things. Provisioning all those things inhouse is not feasible. Doing things on cloud have their own advantages and disadvantage and that’s where co-location comes into play. The advantage with cloud is that you should be able to manage your cloud usage very well. At the same time, there is some infra required for many cases – may be patient’s information, core banking or R&D lab for a large enterprise. Sometimes people are not comfortable putting these types of data on cloud. At times there are technical reasons, or it is a comfort zone of CIOs to put it in their own infra. This is where a standardized scalable capacity helps the CIOs.
Second is all responsible organizations today have their own sustainability goals and that’s where data centers like ours who have embedded sustainability in all the phases of building and operating the data centers become an easy choice for them. We have been awarded with IGBC Platinum certification.
Our data centers are optimized from the level of scalability and high density. We have a strong engineering team which will be able to customize anything that the CIOs want which may not be possible in-house.
What are your competitive advantages?
First is that we provide predictable delivery. Second is the core engineering team enables us to do some things, which are difficult to achieve in today’s market because each of them has come with an immense amount of experience in the industry. By default, we have a lot of specifications in our data center that easily works for our customers. We are open for any levels of customizations. We follow extremely stringent safety stands. We also have a third-party consultant on safety, who makes sure that all the processes are implemented. They do periodic audit. They do surprise visits and that helps in elevating our safety levels. Also, when you have a very strong engineering team, there are various ways in which you can build a data center. You can either appoint a general contractor, ask them to do it. For someone like us, we do procurement directly. We have 15 large procurement processes, for example, UPS, PDU, power, transformer, GS – each of these for us are separate packages and there are 20 smaller packages. For each package we require 3- 6 organizations to participate in RFQ process. We do all of the innovations in House. That gives us few advantages. One is best cost advantage. Our cost of investment is one of the best. Second is it creates great control on our partners on the supply chain, timelines of delivery, quality of delivery or any kind of customization, etc. That enables our output of giving good quality and timely quality. We are the only company that everyone in the organization is a certified data center professional – even the accountant, the investment analyst, the head of finance. They have done the basic course on data center. They understand the technicality of data center. The core engineering team and the core operations team. The engineering team is ATD (Accredited Tier Designers). The operations team is in the process of getting similar certification process. So, we train our employees with necessary certifications to make them best engineering team out there in the industry and that’s how we compete with other organizations in the industry.
What’s the roadmap as far as sustainability is concerned?
When we talk about power utilization, 40% is something that we are doing from non -conventional energy sources but we are already working with partners to figure out, how we can take this 40% to something higher.
But when it comes to sustainability, it is a constant process. It starts from designing of the data center – wow do you structure the processes and how do we minimize the losses and it also continues with the choice of the equipment that we are using. Besides we are also working on operations part of it … what is the temperature that the customers desires, what is the set point, etc. And then these infrastructures are about to run for 10-40 years, to some extent, you also future proof your data center.
How relevant is MU1 data center for your company? What is your plan?
India is one of the key geographies across Asia growing at a very fast rate. The data center industry is expected to double in three years. Given that fact, our Co- founders have a lot of experience in India market also. So, India is a very crucial market for us. It’s a huge milestone because we are operationalizing capacity in India. We won’t stop here. We want to be a formidable co-location player in India. The idea is to expand capacity in Mumbai beyond this data center and also expand it to the leading cities including Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune, etc. We will have data centers in these cities of at least a similar size if not more.
What is your participation in Edge data centers?
Edge data center has two meanings. One is the data center with highly network dense. Secondly is the data center closer to the customers. So that is a process that we are watching very closely. As we see that place developing, we are open to invest in those data centers although the size would be comparatively smaller.
