CtrlS to spend Rs 20 bn on world's largest tier-4 datacentre infra in India

CEO Sridhar Pinnapureddy said the firm will fund its expansion mostly from internal accruals and partly with debt funding

Hyderabad-based technology infrastructure provider CtrlS plans to set up world's largest tier-4 data centre footprint in India by 2020 with an investment of Rs 20 billion, according to a top company official. 

The company plans to set up a 150-megawatt hyper-scale data centre in Hyderabad that will be spread across two million square feet, a 100 Mw similar facility in Mumbai and a 70 Mw set-up in Chennai - spread over around a million square feet each, CtrlS Datacenters, founder and CEO, Sridhar Pinnapureddy told PTI. 

"The demand for data storage has boomed in the country and data localisation is also creating a huge demand for hyper-scale data centre in India. We will start building a new tier-4 data centre in Mumbai from March, Hyderabad facility from around May-June and Chennai in the last quarter of 2019. Total investment will be around Rs 20 billion," Pinnapureddy said.  

He said that all the data centres will be functional in 2020. 

A tier-4 data centre has assured 99.995 per cent uptime implying maximum of 26 minutes downtime in a year. It requires almost double the investment made in tier-3 data centre, which can have downtime of up to few hours in a year. 

The CEO said the firm will fund its expansion mostly from internal accruals and partly with debt funding.

"With the addition of around 4 million square feet, CtrlS will emerge as World's largest Tier-4 data centre entity to cater to need of emerging technologies. World's 90 per cent data has been generated in the last 1,000 days. This part Indian data localisation policy will lead to the large growth of data in India as most of the overseas companies operating in banking," Pinnapureddy said.

The company already has 1 million square feet data centres, which includes two tier-4 facilities in Mumbai, two tier-4 in Hyderabad, one tier-4 in Noida and a tier-3 data centre in Chennai. 

"The largest Tier-4 player would have a footprint of approximately one million square feet. However, CtrlS will soon enjoy a cumulative footprint of five million Tier-4 data centre space spread across 10 datacenters in India thereby emerging as the world's largest tier-4 data centre," CtrlS Datacenters, VP-marketing, B S Rao said. 

He said that CtrlS currently serves 20 of the Fortune 100 global multi-national companies.

According to a Cushman and Wakefield report, the global data centre market is dominated by the Americas with 40 per cent of market share or $68 billion in investments followed by Europe and Russia together at 32 per cent or $54 billion.

It projects that India will be a $4.5 billion data centre market by 2018 and will reach $7 billion by 2020. Its 350 million smartphone users, 258 million social media users, and 224 million digital buyers are also contributing to growth of data.

Besides, the Asia-Pacific market is growing rapidly with a 25 per cent market share at $42 billion driven by the demand from emerging economies with huge populations such as China, India, and Indonesia.