India's massive data consumption, the coming of 5G technology and the move towards data localisation make data centre development the go-to business
Demand for data centre space requirement is likely to increase by around 15 to 18 msf across major Indian cities in the next five years
Out of adversity came success for 46-year-old technology-focussed entrepreneur Sridhar Pinnapureddy. In the early 2000s, his internet service venture Pioneer Internet had failed to scale up and ran into losses. “There was a compelling need to carve out a niche, to either differentiate or die,” he tells Forbes India. His intuition, in 2005, was that data centers—then largely used by websites—would be the future powerhouses of the economy.
Pinnapureddy and his leadership team travelled to the US to study data centers there and realised that India did not operate a single Tier-4 data centre. Tier-4 data centres, contrary to perception, need to be of the highest quality, with a completely fault tolerant design, continuous cooling, an expected uptime of 99.995 percent and no more than 26.3 minutes of downtime in a year. A Tier-1 data centre is basic and offers little sophistication to the client, besides an uptime of 99.67 percent.
CtrlS now sees building edge data centres—smaller data centres closer to the end user—as the next growth opportunity
(This story appears in the 02 July, 2021 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)