CHENNAI: Constructing big-ticket date centres is costly business. The annual revenue growth of $700 million from 2016 to 2019 will require an investment of $1 trillion in building construction and data centre power and cooling fit-outs.
Officials said Ascendas, which intends to build data centres in three cities in India, including Chennai, had requested permission for six levels of diesel generator and steel structure installations. This will require 700 sqm of additional land.
Currently, the state does not have regulations to support 13 times the number of generators to be deployed in a building. In other countries, generators are stacked on steel structures up to six layers releasing FSI space for server hosting.
Ascendas has also urged the Housing department not to classify data centres under IT or IT-enabled services as it does not fit into any existing building development classification in India.
While the purpose of IT or ITES building is to house a large number of IT employees, the purpose of data centre is to house vast amount of network and server requirement.
Besides, the state government has also been urged to relax parking space requirements for dedicated data centre buildings as well as waive or reduce 10 pc land reservation for recreational purpose.
It is learnt that once the large data centres are built, global and reputable internet and cloud service providers will relocate their application servers and data storage in India.
Once the servers are relocated, then service providers will have to recruit and train local engineers to support cloud applications, network and server equipment. It will also generate business for both electrical and mechanical industries as electrical and cooling equipment will be required, sources stated.
Job spinner
Data centres will house trillions of dollars of computing and network equipment and create thousands of IT and engineering jobs for software, electrical and mechanical engineers The data centre growth drivers include online purchases, migration of enterprise IT systems to cloud platforms and government’s initiative to transform Indian cities into smart IoT-enabled cities.
What is a data centre?
A data centre is typically a repository which is used to house facilities crucial to the working of organisations. Either physical or virtual infrastructure, they are used mainly as storage facilities for computing systems (server, telecommunication, back-ups power and so on). The size of the centre varies significantly — it can be a small room or abuilding depending on the enterprise it is supposed to cater to.