Our goal is to provide smart, safe, and sustainable power solutions for data centres.

- Karthik Krishnamurthi

Head of Sales and Marketing, Hitachi Energy India

How is the data centre market evolving in India?

India is one of the major contenders in the data centre segment in the APAC region. The need for data centre infrastructures is growing exponentially, as cloud adoption and data consumption are reaching unprecedented levels. An increase in adoption of cloud and of upcoming technologies such as 5G and IoT are driving the data centre demand in India.

The Indian Government is taking several initiatives to boost the segment, including a proposal in the Union Budget to provide data centres infrastructure status. This brings it on par with industries such as Railways, Roadways, and Power, simplifies clearances and eases the process of availing of long-term credit from domestic and international lenders.

The data centre market in India is currently estimated to have a total capacity of around 824 MW (source: Cushman & Wakefield), concentrated in Mumbai, NCR, Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata. Notably, Mumbai has the highest installed capacity yet, with a focus on hyperscale. With increased digitalisation and government's push for data sovereignty capacity is expected to grow three-fold by 2025 (source: JLL).

How critical is efficient power management in data center facilities? What are the key power solutions from Hitachi Energy for data centres?

Data centres are estimated to account for two per cent of global electricity consumption and is expected to rise in the coming years with the exponential growth in digitalisation. As data centres consume enormous amounts of energy, enhancing power efficiency becomes critical for data centre sustainability and profitability.

At the capex stage data centres have to build in access to renewable energy and deployment of energy management systems. Today, Hitachi Energy's solutions account for around 15% of the capex of every 1 MW of data centre.

At Hitachi Energy, our goal is to provide smart, safe, and sustainable power solutions for data centres; from project feasibility through design and delivery up to operation. The company offers services and solutions for smooth functioning throughout the lifecycle of the data centre - dry type transformers, substation planning and execution, switch gear and communication solutions (such as IEC 61850 Process-Bus communication), with digitalisation embedded at every step.

Let's take the example of Digital Transformer TXpert™: TXpert™ is an open, scalable, manufacturer-agnostic ecosystem for the digitalisation of transformers, designed to drive data-driven intelligence and decision making in the operations and maintenance of transformers. The digital transformer TXpert™ portfolio provides real-time monitoring of vital transformer parameters giving insights into power quality and asset conditions.

How is the government's digitalisation policy driving the efficiency of data centre facilities in the country?

The rise of data consumption rates in India is due to government's digitalisation policy initiatives is fuelling the growth of data centres in the country. India is currently riding the wave of digital transformation with billions and millions of mobile connections and internet users. New-age services have changed the way we avail services leading to humongous growth of data and protection of the data. In addition to this, the unprecedented events of the pandemic have led to digital infrastructure becoming imperative and have added large momentum to this growth.

Data centres in the country have been supported by various efforts of the government in forms of various enablements. The magnitude of the digital economy in India is estimated to grow from $ 200 billion in 2017-18 to a staggering $ 1 trillion by 2025. The growth trajectory of the digital economy and the digital population in the country emphasizes the potential to fulfill the growing demands with stronger growth of the data centre networks.

This policy intends to accelerate the projected data centre growth and investments in the sector, thereby making India a global data centre hub, promoting investment in the sector, propelling digital economy growth, enabling the provisioning of trusted hosting infrastructure to fulfill the growing demand of the country, and facilitating state-of-the-art service delivery.

What are the digital and sustainable solutions from the company for data centres?

We offer a suite of smart sustainable solutions for data centres which can reduce the amount of footprint, material consumption and installation time. With 80% less copper control cables - 60% less space in control room - 3X faster installation solutions are designed for compact footprint and quick commissioning.

Smart sustainable data centre substation design contributes to global sustainability by modular physical size, lower carbon footprint and reduction of operational support. These include:

• Integrated gas-insulated switchgear in pre-fabricated housing
• Sustainable GIS with alternative insulation GAS
• Smart primary equipment: Optical current sensors, Digital GIS, Txplore Power™ transformers, and
• Digital substation

What kind of opportunities do you visualize for global players and technologies in the Indian data centre market?

A large and still growing internet user base, the explosion of data and the creation of a conducive atmosphere via the government's Digital India mission has transformed India into a fast-growing data centre hub. Riding on the explosion of data through smartphones, social networking sites, e-commerce, digital entertainment, digital education, digital payments, and many other digital services need for data centre is further necessitated for the protection of the digital sovereignty of the country. The growth in data is further stimulated by the adoption of emerging technologies such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence, the Internet of things, etc. This need for data centre infrastructure in the country already opens a potential opportunity for investments, which could be further increased given the progress in the direction of becoming a data centre location of choice for global players. India's data centre policy aims to offset challenges in order to accelerate the current pace of growth and propel India into becoming a global data centre hub.

How do you look at the future of data centre market in India?

The data centre market in India is poised for a sustained period of growth, driven by a diverse range of consumption and demographic trends, as per the study by Nxtra. With the impending rollout of 5G services, we will see demand for data increasing which will drive the need for more data centres (study shows 5G user consume 2-3X more data vs 4G users).

Owing to business and infrastructure advantages, strategic location, and cable landing stations that are well-positioned to support, the data centre industry growth is expected to concentrate in hubs like Chennai and Mumbai. the ongoing growth of the data centre industry is spearhead by the convergence of data protection, strong demand from cloud players, migration from captive to cloud, industry-friendly regulations, government's digital initiatives and investments.

Hits: 0