Sify Technologies scales up data center biz

MUMBAI, INDIA: Chennai-based Sify Technologies Limited expects good growth in its data center business. It has four data centers of tier-III class located at Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai, where it has two data centers. And now the company is adding a fifth one, which is under construction at Noida and is expected to be fully operational later this year.

P J Nath, Sify’s executive president – Enterprise Business, said Sify was the first company to set up its own data centers in India. “Our first data center was launched in 2000 at Vashi on the outskirts of Mumbai and there after we have added three more,” he said.

The upcoming data center building in Noida has a total area of over 130,000 square feet.

“It’s a tier-III class data center, owned and designed by Sify, which is expected to be fully operational by September/October this year,” Nath said.

He informed this to the media on the sidelines of the launch of Sify’s on-demand storage service in partnership with Hitachi Data Systems in Mumbai on Wednesday.

While tier-IV class data centers are considered the best in the IT industry, Nath explained that all the five data centers of Sify are tier-III class because, tier-IV class data center requires dual source of power but it’s not possible to have dual source in India.

“Even though our data centers are tier-III class we offer services equivalent to tier IV class and we have made arrangement for it. Our Airoli-based data center near Mumbai has a dedicated MSEB substation that offers power supply up to 25 mega watts directly from the power grid,” he added. Sify invested around Rs.150 crore for Airoli data center.

The data center offerings are part of Sify’s enterprise services which include connectivity service, data center hosting service, enterprise application service, voice service and system integration service.

Nath claimed that very few companies have such dedicated substations for the data centers in India.

“We keep on looking at new opportunities within the data center services and Sify focuses on adding new services the existing services which allow in providing complete data center service offering,” he said.

The NASDAQ listed company invested around Rs 250 crore in IT infrastructure last year. During the third quarter of 2009-10, the hosting services grew by 20 per cent which includes new initiatives such as high capacity managed storage and computing services along with cloud computing.

Overall, in the three quarters of the current fiscal, Sify has invested around US$ 12.43 million as capital expenditure for data center expansion and network infrastructure. Sify has around 3000 enterprise customers from verticals such as banking, finance, insurance and telecommunication and will add more customers in the next few years, Nath said.