Exclusive Interaction - Amit Aggarwal, Head, Business Development, Yotta

The recent launches of mega datacentres in Pune and Chennai by Yotta has  created ample opportunities for the CSPs. Amit Aggarwal, Head, Sales & Business Development, Yotta, discusses these datacentres and the opportunities for the CSPs in this interaction

Tell us in detail about the large-scale datacentres  coming up in Chennai and what kind of job opportunities they will bring for the IT professionals

Our data center park in Chennai will be built on a 13-acre campus at Hiranandani Park on the Singaperumal - Oragadam highway and will comprise 4 buildings with a capacity of 20,000 racks, backup generator sets and total power load of about 240 MW. Similar to the Yotta facility in Navi Mumbai, this datacentre park will also be carrier-neutral with the presence of major telcos and own fibre network; it will have a 220/110 KV electrical substation and a CNG power plant. We have planned to invest INR 3000 – 4000 crores over the next 8-10 years in this data center and the first building is expected to be ready by the last quarter of 2021. With a built-up area of 230,000 square feet, the Yotta building will offer 25 MW IT power and have a capacity for 5000 racks. To maintain and operate a data center, one requires manpower across various functions. We are estimating around 2000-2500 jobs, both directly and indirectly will be created due to this. Among others, we will hire Datacentre operation specialists, Application Developers, Cloud Architects, IoT Developers, Security experts, Cloud Security Specialists in Tamil Nadu through our project.

How do the Cloud technology providers stand to gain from the Yotta datacenter at Navi Mumbai and Chennai? Do you have more such datacentres  planned?

Yotta provides cloud services to Enterprises, at the same time to Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). In terms of cloud computing, the most vital things are connectivity, scalability, and availability. CSPs cannot afford any downtime, not even a second. Our first data center building - Yotta NM1, is the largest Uptime Institute Tier IV designed data center in Asia and second-largest in the world. CSPs look in for quality and scalability in terms of space, power and connectivity. We provide all these at the same site. Power is another factor that CSPs value, our datacentre campus houses power distribution infrastructure at the same time we also have the license to distribute via our group company. Besides this to save further on power costs, we are commissioning our solar power plant and natural gas-based power generation plant adjacent to the datacentre.

For connectivity, we have bulk fiber connectivity that we offer to OTT and CSPs. Also to provide unlimited fibre capacity to CSPs between their various points of presence, we are creating a unique and first of its kind Inter-Datacentre Metro Fibre Network. This will connect the Yotta datacentre park to all other datacentres, business hubs across Mumbai/Navi Mumbai. With high availability, carrier neutral and low latency network, CSPs get a nearly 100% uptime reliability and a state-of-the-art digital infrastructure for faster go to market.

The  Chennai Yotta datacentre as well will be built on these lines and will offer uptime Institute certified Tier IV design and construction standards to ensure utmost reliability. Over the next 5-7 years,we plan to build 3 data center parks across Navi Mumbai, Chennai, and Delhi, out of which Navi Mumbai’s first building is already live.The combined capacity of these parks will be 60,000 racks and 500 MW of power.

 What arrangements are made for the data security and data privacy at these gigantic datacentres?

Yotta received the highest certification for datacentre design - the uptime Institute Tier IV Certification of Design Documents Certification (TCDD) in May this year for our first datacentre, Yotta NM1 in Navi Mumbai. This high level of uptime ensures the safety of the companies despite mechanical failures. Backup systems are already in place for data storage, network, connectivity, power, and cooling. The data center security is sectionalised with two-factor authentication controls. Fault tolerance provides continuity even during the downtime that keeps the company’s business from slowing down. One of the highlights of our data center building – Yotta NM1 is that is can run uninterrupted on full load for 48 hours, this is thanks to our 32 diesel generators onsite.

Yotta NM1 is secured with multiple layers of security, besides physical security checks, and other conventional security measures that you find everywhere, we are the only data center in India to secure to have state-of-the-art chemical and narcotics detector.

 How are the technologies of Cloud and datacentres evolving in 2020, especially with the lockdown?

The reliance on cloud computing has grown leaps by Enterprises. While the change in digital transformation was in order, COVID-19 has fast tracked this. According to IDC's COVID-19 Impact on IT spending Survey, May 2020, due to the spread of the pandemic 64% of the organizations in India are expected to increase demand for cloud computing while 56% for cloud software to support the new working environment. Increased remote working has fast-tracked the evolution of many businesses into becoming digitally native, and enterprises had to adopt new ways of working and upgrade their IT infrastructures aggressively. Enterprises are also moving to Multi-tenant data centers (MTDCs) like us from their on-premise data center as we can ensure better business continuity during these times. Data centers are classified under essential services and hence can operate even under lockdowns, which otherwise is an issue for Enterprises.

As per Markets and markets.com, the India data center market size is expected to reach USD 1.5 billion by 2022 from USD 1.0 billion in 2018, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 11.4% during the forecast period. The market is driven by the increase in digital data traffic, deeper internet penetration, cloud services, and expected growth for emerging technologies like IoT.