India towards Self-Reliance in Digital Economy with launch of Yotta Data Centre by Hiranandani Group

India’s largest Data Center building, Yotta NM1, the largest Tier IV Data Center, certified by Uptime Institute in Asia, and the second largest in the world was inaugurated in the virtual presence of Shri Uddhav Thackeray, Hon. Chief Minister, Maharashtra; Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, Hon. Minister for Communications, Electronics & Information Technology and Law & Justice, Govt. of India and Shri Subhash Desai, Hon. Minister of Industries and Mining, Govt. of Maharashtra.

What makes the Yotta story unique is our ownership of all key input resources, massive economies of scale with our land banks, captive green energy generation and distribution capabilities and unmatched expertise and experience in Data Center domain including design, engineering, construction and operations, said Dr. Niranjan Hiranandani, MD and Co-founder, Hiranandani Group.

“This Data Center is a global pioneer not just in terms of capability and price but more so in terms of its focus on efficiency and sustainability. We provide the most efficient power offering available in the market today – not just the lowest price of power but also a Power Usage Efficiency or PUE that is a global benchmark for the tropics,” said Darshan Hiranandani, Group CEO – Hiranandani Group.

Being an industry leader is also about being ahead of the curve, and when it comes to diversifying into the segment of data centres, the MD and co-founder, Hiranandani Group has timed it to perfection. In the second half of 2019, he announced setting up of Yotta Infrastructure, a Hiranandani Group subsidiary and a Managed Data Centre Service Provider, which would develop hyper-scale data centre parks in India.

For a real estate developer better known for its integrated townships to foray into the shared data centre space may have raised questions in mid-2019, but it has been a story of right timing and leveraging the right set of tech-specs which made the project future-ready. Originally seen as a segment of commercial real estate where the primary activity was to build and lease buildings to corporates to store their data, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen an upsurge of end-users from different segments, including e-commerce, online banking, entertainment, education and OTT.

The Initial stage is termed as Phase zero (0). The plan is to migrate to renewables and gas-based combined heat and power generation on site will provide chilled water at the most efficient cost structure possible and will bring design PUE numbers down to 1.2 – again unheard of in Indian weather conditions. But the plan does not stop there; it includes building facilities today to ensure that can be future ready, to run 100 per cent on renewables whether offsite through solar and wind coupled with on-site Hydrogen based co-generation and fuel cells in the future.

Dr. Niranjan Hiranandani has ambitious plans of potentially investing about ₹ 3500 crores in datacenter business across Navi Mumbai, Chennai to begin with. The group has already made Rs 1000crs investment in its first data centre going live at our Hiranandani Fortune City township in Panvel. He attributes the initial interest in the segment to India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who spoke about a ‘digital India’; a ‘Make in India’; data to be located and stored in India and plans to achieve a $5 trillion economy. The past couple of years had seen these aspects take the data centre space to growth levels of over 100 per cent year-on-year.

This prompted setting up of the 100 per cent subsidiary of the Hiranandani Group, Yotta, which will offer hyper-density, hyper-scalable data centre and co-location solutions to enterprises with supporting managed IT, hybrid multi cloud and security services. The Group already has the expertise for building data centres, it has the land suitable for data centres as also the most important – expertise of power efficiency. These put together, will create efficiency-plus data centres, with operating costs estimated to reduce by 20 per cent.

Beginning with Panvel, where Yotta’s growth plans began with building of the data centre park – the country’s largest, spread over 18 acres, comprising five data centres and 30,000 racks. Amidst projections at the time Dr. Niranjan Hiranandani announced setting up of Yotta, which showed huge demand for data centres in the near future, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen a sharp spike in quantum of data centre spaces, and Yotta, its start-up stage at the first such building in Panvel, has been able to handle the quantum leap in demand for data centre spaces.

The COVID-19 pandemic, lockdown and work from home (WFH) have multiplied digital and online transactions, these all reflect in incremental demand at data centers, be it to power collaborative tools like Zoom; usage of enterprise tools like SAP or net banking, as also on the consumer side, OTT platforms for entertainment like Netflix, Hotstar etc. There is a 30 to 30 per cent hike in data center capacity usage, and even after the situation returns to ‘normal’, the work style will continue to be data center driven, and demand growth will continue.
As enterprises and Government agencies now focus more than ever before on Self-Reliance (“Atmanirbhar”) in their supply chains within the country, this has also lead to more emphasis on data privacy/protection and consequently on data localisation.

The demand for hyper-scale data centers is on the rise, thanks to Governments push for the National E-commerce Policy and proposed policy on Data Center Parks. Also, with the new normal established due to COVID, reliance on technology from enterprises and consumers has increased. All these factors together make for a tremendous growth story for data centers in India.

What makes the Yotta story unique is the Hiranandani Group’s ownership of all key input resources, massive economies of scale with our land banks, captive green energy generation and distribution capabilities and unmatched expertise and experience in Data Center domain including design, engineering, construction and operations.

Data Centers are a ‘sunrise’ segment in Indian commercial real estate, and it shows potential to grow at a fast pace. Sectors such as BFSI, logistics, transportation, e-commerce, media and entertainment as also government agencies are driving high demand for data centers. For the team at Yotta, the formal inauguration caps on-going negotiations with a large number of potential users, these should get implemented once the lockdown is truly lifted and ‘normalcy’ returns to the Indian economy.

NOTES:
With proximity to Mumbai and Pune, Yotta NM1 Data Center is located in the 600-acre Hiranandani Fortune City in Panvel. Yotta NM1 is first of the five data center buildings coming up at this Integrated Yotta Data Center Park, which, once fully built, will have an overall capacity of 30,000 racks and 250 MW power. At 820,000 sq. ft, 7,200 racks, 50 MW of power and 4 redundant self-owned fiber paths connecting the DC to national highways, the first DC Yotta NM1 itself offers a highly scalable data centre infrastructure, capable of hosting global cloud, content and OTT operators besides the mission-critical applications of enterprises and governments. The ultramodern building, supported by a highly redundant on-site Power infrastructure shall soon be powered by its own captive solar power plant and an on-site captive gas-based co-gen power plant thus delivering to its hosted customers long term reliable, green and cost-effective source of power.

With the COVID-19 pandemic fast-tracking the digital transformation efforts across enterprises and mass transition to remote working, a report by Canalys Global says that cloud spends have been at a record high in Q12020, up 34% during the time. As enterprises increase their dependency on cloud services, and as India becomes increasingly digital, shifting speedily to web collaboration, e-commerce, e-payments, emerging Technologies like AI, ML, IoT, Robotics, connected cars, and as 5G adoption takes up, the resultant growth in generated data is humongous and requires a massive buildout of evolved data processing and storage facilities i.e Data centers. Initiatives under the Digital India campaign further accelerate the growth in India’s data center industry.

About Yotta: Yotta is a Managed Data Center Service Provider that designs, builds, and operates large-scale hyper density Data Centre Parks in Navi Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi. A 100% subsidiary of the real estate giant Hiranandani Group, Yotta offers a whole array of services like Wholesale Colo, retail colo, Hybrid Multi-cloud, IT management, Security services, network connectivity and more – all on a pay as you use model.
With many of these ‘industry-firsts’, including self-owned land banks, inhouse DC design and construction capabilities, generation and distribution of power including green energy, a unique Inter-DC Metro Fiber Network, innovative data center services stack, a highly experienced management team and working on huge economies of scale, Yotta has become a trendsetter and offers the best value to its customers without burdening them with bloated bills.