Expertise and understanding of Indian market's strengths & weakness gives ability of seamlessly integrating various components.

Vimal Kaw

Head - Data Center Services, NTT India

Data center sector is expected to witness a significant growth in the next few years. In that backdrop, how critical is the management of DCs which store large amounts of critical and sensitive data, which is also vulnerable?

Data center infrastructure management (DCIM) is integral to providing a world-class data center customer experience to our clients around the world.

Through our state-of-the-art customer portal, our clients can monitor system operation status and manage their equipment and wiring seamlessly. By visualizing the real-time status of server room temperature and humidity, equipment status, power usage, and air-conditioning workload, our clients can experience the flexible and efficient operations and use this information for future expansion plans. In case of any trouble, both our clients as well as our own data center staff monitor the same screen and can solve the problem rapidly and smoothly.

Using our portal, clients can also define their own threshold levels, with different levels of settings to indicate the warning level and critical level for both high and low degrees. Alarms, if any, are displayed on the portal screen in real-time when levels exceed set thresholds and clients are also alerted via email and text, ensuring that clients are always on top of the real-time status of their data center infrastructure.

What are your offerings in the data center space? Also, what are the benefits that your customers gain, for example, energy cost savings, security etc. from the solutions you provide.

NTT provides an integrated and holistic data center service offering. We currently operate over 160 mission-critical data centers in over 20 countries and regions, with almost 500,000+ m² of server space availability (and expanding).

We provide a full stack of high-qualitydata center offerings aligned with our global on-demand ICT services. Our core data center offerings span colocation, data center management and data center technology. Equally importantly, as a carrier-neutral operator, our connectivity-rich data center network provides a scalable and resilient platform, enabling our clients with the innovation and growth environment they seek, wherever they need it.

We understand that every business - large and small - has its own unique needs and goals when it comes to their data center infrastructure, which is our data centers are designed to meet everything from partial-rack requirements to larger requirements involving cages, and finally all the way through to turnkey built-to-suit facilities that are exponentially larger.

There's also a suite of value-added services that we offer that includes services such as migration, remote-hands, and comprehensive monitoring and management, which allow us to provide a holistic data center client experience.

Finally, we offer our clients access to our state-of-the-art Technology Experience Labs, or TELs.

The TELs allow our clients to try-before-you-buy, meet their partners, and get hands-on with a wide ecosystem of tools and technologies.

In short, through our tailored local expertise, worldwide connected platform and NTT's portfolio of global technology solutions, we are an enabler of growth and innovation for our clients - wherever they are in the world.

What is your take on the benefits of prefabricated data centers and how are you geared for the same?

Prefabricated data centers aren't really a new trend, but they've been gradually growing in prevalence due to the emergence of edge data centers. Since they're pre-assembled and modular, they offer great flexibility in terms of space, cost and operational efficiency. At NTT, we believe that prefabricated data centers might develop into an integral piece of an overall data center strategy as a viable option to quickly build and deploy smaller data centers in the non-metro cities or edge locations. We've evaluated and confirmed the benefits and usability of the pre-fabricated data centers and are currently evaluating how to integrate them into our future plans.

Also, there is a growing focus on Tier 4 fault tolerant data centres that ensure reduced downtime. Your take on the same.

All NTT data centers are precision-engineered for maximum uptime, and we achieve this by following NTT's own design and operational standards that demand multiple redundancies across all critical systems and allow for no single point of failure. These standards are extremely stringent, which means that our clients can trust us to deliver industry-leading levels of availability. We focus on at designing and operating our data centers to run at the highest levels of performance and efficiency, which means our facilities in India and around the world are designed with the requisite performance and reliability our clients need for continuous and efficient operations without interruption.

Another key consideration is ensuring that the facilities are designed and built to facilitate key business certifications such as PCI DSS, TVRA, and DCRA - to name just a few. This enables our clients to have their environments certified quickly and easily because our design approach follows such stringent standards.

We don't just run the most stable, reliable and secure data centers in the world, we also do it backed by NTT's history of stability and investment.

Tell us about the challenges when it comes to implementation of robust integrated systems? Do you feel there needs to be a policy framework in place to remove the bottlenecks, if any?

NTT has always believed in the power of integrated systems, and we are India's leading provider of single-stop-shop 360-degree digital tech integration. We offer a holistic suite of options to our clients taking care of their end-to-end IT infrastructure needs such as data centers, cloud, software, cybersecurity products and network etc.

One of the biggest challenges in implementing seamless integration is the access to the right technology and expertise. We have built an immense and wholly integrated ecosystem over the 20+ years of our operations, right from the early days of internet in India. Thus, the expertise and understanding of Indian market's strengths and weakness gives us the ability of seamlessly integrating various components and a single-window-management of the infrastructure.

What are your future plans in terms of expansion in newer fields through strategic partnerships, acquisitions, investment and hiring for the next 2-3 years?

NTT Ltd. in India currently operates 1.5 million sq ft (139,000 sq m) of space across 10 data centers in Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Bangalore and Chennai. Our plans are to increase the footprint to over 2.5 million sq ft (232,000 sq m) in the next three years and enter four more cities. We are planning to build six data center parks out of which three are already under construction at Mahape, Airoli (both in Navi Mumbai), and Chandivali in Mumbai. The others are planned in Chennai, Delhi and Bangalore. The upcoming data center in Noida (Delhi NCR) will be a 70 MW facility and we also intend to enter Hyderabad and Pune markets as soon as there is adequate demand in these cities.

We've also  built a comprehensive pan-India partner ecosystem over the years. We work with select MSP partners with proven competencies and ability to expand the reach of NTT services through their network and value-added services. The partner network will continue to play a key role in our expansion plans and we see these partnerships as a key growth driver.

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