Data centres lapping up more space

Tech companies and telecom operators expanding data centre operations to meet growing business needs had led to a spur in demand for real estate.

A data centre is a large centralised facility which houses and maintains infrastructure, such as computers, servers, storage and networking systems, required to run business operations. A typical data centre occupies 20,000-30,000 sq.ft of space.

Currently, the total space occupied by data centres is around 25 million sq.ft — this includes centres maintained by service providers (who maintain infrastructure for third-party customers) and those run by companies for their own use (captive centres).

“The data centre market has been growing at 15-20 per cent per annum for the last two years, and we expect 1.5 million sq.ft to be added by third party data centres and 2-3 million sq.ft by captive centres every year for the next three years,” says Mr Shrinivas Rao, CEO – Asia-Pacific, Vestian Global Workplace Services, a real-estate services firm.

Demand drivers

Currently, Indian and global IT companies such as Netmagic, Cisco, IBM and HP are setting up data centres in the country. The reasons for expanding data centre operations are risk mitigation (disaster recovery centres) and growing operations in the country. Growing popularity of cloud computing — wherein companies do not own IT infrastructure but outsource it to service providers — is also a driver for data centre growth. In fact, communications service providers such as Reliance, Airtel and Tata Communications look at co-locating and managed hosting solutions for customers as big business, driving the need for data centres.

With the Government also stepping up efforts to deliver efficient services to citizens, the need to set up large data centres has gone up. Last year, Wipro Infotech bagged government orders from Gujarat, Maharashtra and West Bengal to set up state data centres.

“Companies setting up new offices are allotting around 10 per cent of the space to data centre development,” says Mr Mahesh Khaitan, Director, Salarpuria Sattva Group, a developer who has set up data centres for Intel, Cisco and Lucent.

“While the market is driven by IT, service industry and telecom, manufacturing companies are looking to set-up their data centres but of smaller scale,” says Mr Rao.

Data centres not only exist in tier 1 cities such as Bangalore, Mumbai and Chennai, but are also coming up in tier 2 cities such as Pune, Noida, Jaipur and Hyderabad.

Key requirements

How is the environment in the country for setting up data centres? “The demand for real estate is huge today with several conglomerates expanding operations. Data centres require large tracts of real estate, apart from easy access to power, water and energy. The data centre should not only have access to power but should also be designed in such a manner that it makes best use of power. Connectivity is also an issue,” says Mr Durgadutt Nedungadi, Director-Sales, HP Enterprise Business, HP India, which is setting up a data centre in the country exclusively for its cloud computing customers.

According to Mr Khaitan, apart from access to power, developers also need to provide back-up facilities and back-up to the back-up.

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