Yotta, a managed data centre service provider that designs, builds and operates large-scale hyper-density data centre parks in India recently made headlines in the tech sector. This was because the Hiranandani Group ventured into Yotta Infrastructure to make it a 100% subsidiary of the Hiranandani Group.

Heading Yotta Infrastructure now is Sunil Gupta who is known as the ‘Data Centre Man of India’. He brings a rich experience of 27 years and a proven track record of building 15+ hyper-scale hyperdensity data centres. He was previously associated with Netmagic as the president, COO and executive director. At Yotta he serves as the Managing Partner and Chief Executive Officer.

Analytics India Magzine got in touch with Gupta to get an understanding of his ambitious plans behind setting up data centre parks in India. Here are the interview excerpts: 

Analytics India Magazine: How has the data centre market in India grown over the last decade or so?

Sunil Gupta: The data centre market in India has grown drastically in the last 20 years. Two things that have driven its growth are data and cloud computing. The growth of data is internally linked to a lot of market drivers such as the evolution of 4G and 5G, cheap data plans, wide access to smartphones, high-speed internet and more. These factors have resulted in a lot of data being created and consumed by the users. This entire data is getting stored, analysed and computed somewhere and that place is nothing but data centre. Growth in the data centre can also be attributed to an increase in the growth of industries such as e-commerce, banking and more. This has resulted in data growth by 70% year-on-year. This is leading to huge consumption of data centres and the need for companies to have underlying IT capacities to support data growth. 

AIM: How are companies which are moving from captive data centres to cloud computing affecting the data centre business in India?

SG: Most enterprises used to run their applications in their own captive data centres up until two years from now. They had data centres with their own head office, hardware and software capabilities. In the last few years, there has been an increase in the use of public cloud services that has matured drastically over the years. There is a big shift now in its usage which has resulted in companies setting up bigger and larger data cloud centres in India. They are now ensuring better performance as it has allowed data to be hosted locally thereby reducing latency and improving performance. Enterprises are shifting their workloads from captive data centres to a third-party cloud that has led to phenomenal growth in the third-party data centres. Today every large organisation is building capacity in the cloud.

There are three factors majorly driving public data centres in the last five years.

• Increase in consumer-driven data
• Movement of companies to public cloud
• Government boosting data localisation and protection

AIM: How did the idea of starting Yotta conceptualise?

SG: We explored the fact that the demand for data centres is growing exponentially and there is unlimited scope in the area. And till now we have been only talking about humans consuming data. Once the machine starts consuming through emerging tech such as IoT, AI and ML, the growth of data will be humongous for us to imagine. The demand for data centre capability is going to be practically unlimited. I could realise this from my previous assignments that we cannot keep customers into a guessing game but there needs to be incremental capacity and more systematically planned campus. This is where the concept of Yotta came in as we plan to provide exactly that apart from good infrastructure and power. To make it possible there were two options — first was going to an equity bank asking for funds to establish a park and second was to partner with an infrastructure resource owner and real estate provider such as Hiranandani Group that can bring all the resources together. We opted the latter. With their resources and my data centre domain knowledge, we had all the dots connected and that’s how Yotta came into existence. 

AIM: What are the larger goals for Yotta in the coming future. What is the roadmap and what do you plan to accomplish for Indian analytics ecosystem through it?

SG: Analytics workload and use cases including that of AI, ML, IoT generate and needs a huge amount of data. To make Yotta a commercial success we aim to provide the right kind of infrastructure to run analytics functions in a cost-effective and viable way. India needs humongous investment into data centre infrastructure to run these use cases be it analytics, AI, ML or IoT. Our investment in data centres is a way to make analytics functions successful. Right now we have data centre blueprint in Navi Mumbai, Mumbai and Chennai. Our end goal is to make large data centres to be used by analytics companies. We also aim to provide a complete range of IT services for customers to be able to use cloud and other value-added services apart from running analytics workload.

AIM: Tell us about your funding journey.

SG: My initial project funding is from the internal approvals of the trust of Hiranandani and bank loans. We don’t have immediate plans to raise funding because internally we are self-sufficient. But considering our plans to scale up the business in future we don’t deny the possibility of getting a partner or funding in the future. But not at this stage. 

AIM: What will be the scale of data centres that you are planning to launch?

SG: In terms of racks, the largest data centre today in India has 5,000 racks. The first data centre we are starting is going to be 7,200 racks data centre. It will be almost 45% bigger than the largest data centre in India. I plan to make five such buildings in Navi Mumbai alone, 2 in Mumbai and 5 in Chennai. We aim to provide customers with highly scalable capacity, therefore, entire data centre park is going to be on a much larger scale compared to what it is today. Currently, my blueprint talks about 11 buildings in total which combined will have 60,000 racks. 

AIM: What are the challenges you face while scaling up or making yourself relevant in the market?

SG: Typical challenge of coming as a new service provider is the competition with existing players who may not be very large but have been in the market for a couple of years. While the concept of Yotta may be new, the fact that we have the backing of Hiranandani and the resources in place, we are confident about our venture. Another plus point we have is that I and my team has been in the data centre business for the last 20 years. Practically I started this business in India. I have seen this industry grow from smaller scales to the scale which it is today. We have the resources and domain knowledge and the promise that Yotta can deliver better than existing players. Challenge now is to convey benefits to the end customers.

The post In Conversation With Sunil Gupta, The ‘Data Centre Man of India’ & His Take On Storage & Infrastructure Trends appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.