"At CtrlS, we have been focusing on investments in Hyperscale formats"

B.S. RAO
Vice President, Marketing, CtrlS Datacenters

Data center growth in India: Indian data center services footprint which stands at an estimated five million square feet is likely to cross 30 million square feet in next decade. Today, hyperscale data center space in the country occupies just about 10% of the overall third party data center (DC) market.

This is a true cause for concern as there is increasing demand from hyperscalers and modern business applications. The demand for the hyperscale DC space is expected to be around 5 million square feet as of 2021, but will continue to grow at 20% to 25% CAGR.

In addition, the oligopolistic nature of Indian DC industry suffers from high entry barriers due to high capital expenditure, high fixed costs. However, at CtrlS, we have been focusing on investments in Hyperscale formats and own more than one million square feet of rated-4 hyperscale data center space in the country.

Security & Data center: CtrlS is focused on powering mission critical applications. We are trusted by banks, telecom operators, financial services companies, e-commerce players among others including 30 of the Fortune 500 Global Multinationals – all of them requiring 100% uptime and round-the-clock support to keep their infrastructure and applications running.

We offer industry best uptime SLA of 99.995% combined with fault-tolerant rated-4 data center facilities, industry lowest PUE of 1.35, carrier neutral facilities, rack densities of 30+ KW and above all speed of deployment. We have had a record 100% uptime since inception. Having said that, yes, there has been a growing demand due to COVID-19 as WFH, Learn-from-Home have led to growth of data consumption from academic institutions and access to technologies such as desktop-as-a-service (DAAS). Well, this is a seasonal opportunity, and has led to growth in utilization of our data centers and cloud infrastructure as well.  

Readiness to meet the demand: We are investing in building additional 5 million square feet of rated-4 hyperscale datacenter facilities in India and ready to absorb the likely surge in demand due to Personal Data Protection (PDP) bill which is likelyto be passed by the Indian Government – this will lead to large surge in demand for colocation facilities. Two million squarefeet each in Mumbai and Hyderabad and a million square feet in Chennai. Together, we will have a total of six million squarefeet in India backed by 600 MW of power. We will also be adding 1,000 Edge datacenters in the country focused on Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities. The Post COVID-19 situation, is likely to see India as an alternate destination to China, which will further increasethe consumption of data center space – we will need the entire industry working together to address the forthcoming growth opportunity.