JOIN USITI Limited, the state-owned telecom behemoth, has decided to invest Rs 200 crore as part of its data centre business expansion plan.
Interacting with DH, ITI Chairman and Managing Director S Gopu said the company offers end to end data centre hosting services. “ITI is looking at expanding its data centre operations by building a tier III plus (Uptime 99.982%) data centre with 1000 rack space at Bangalore and 200 racks space data centre at Naini acting as disaster recovery site and vice versa with Rs 200 crore investment in the first phase,” said Gopu.
ITI is the first PSU to start operation of tier III plus data centre with 350 rack space during the year 2009 on PPP model. The data centre was set up in collaboration with Trimax Data Centre Services Ltd. (Trimax), Mumbai.
Gopu said India is expecting massive investment in data centre business as the government is going ahead with Digital India initiatives. "Main drivers for this huge increase are growth in data and digital intelligent devices, digitalisation and also the government’s Digital India campaign and growing importance of IoT," he said.
The first phase of the centre with 50-seater capacity offered a range of services, including colocation services, hosting services and managed services such as server management, network management and security management.
“Data centre is one of ITI’s endeavour to provide customer-centric services to government organisations and corporate entities. With a rack space of 24,000 Sq ft, we are now expecting more orders from government agencies. The new data centre is proposed to go live in October 2017,” said Gopu.
He said the current capacity of ITI data centre is 100% occupied. "Our present clients include state government, central government departments, banks and public sector enterprises," he said. According to research agency Gartner, India became the second fastest growing market in APAC in 2016. The current data center market in India is valued at $2.2 billion, and is expected to touch $4.5 billion mark by 2018.