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"It took us just eight months to complete our Tulip Data City," says the proud Lt Col HS Bedi, chairman and MD of Tulip Telecom. Sitting composed in his cabin in Tulip's office, when asked about what drove his need to build Asia's largest data center in Bengaluru with an investment almost triple of his earlier data centers in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, Bedi smiles and states, "We wanted to give India a global identity."
After its grand launch in February 2012 and by completing the project in mere 8 months' deadline, Tulip has set a classic example of building one of its state-of-the-art data center, where technology is embedded to its core.
The company has strengthened its hold in data center arena with this facility in Bengaluru after attaining enough market share in enterprise data connectivity services, managed and network integrator services, and leading last mile connectivity services.
Tulip, whose customers include Bharti airtel, Aircel, Orange, AT&T, Matrix, Alstom SA, and Royal Philips Electronics NV, is now all set to tap a growing market for data centers in India, which is forecasted to grow 23% over the next 3 years to `11,800 crore, according to CyberMedia Research.
Journey So Far
Tulip in its endeavor to further strengthen its end-to-end data services offering, acquired 100% shares of SADA IT Parks at a value of `230 crore, which was a data center facility in Bengaluru. This added to the company's fifth data center plan and was aimed to have the total data center space of approximately 10 lakh sq ft.
With this takeover, the Tulip Data City was now a complete subsidiary of Tulip Telecom. As per Bedi, "This acquisition provided us with the opportunity to garner a higher market share given our end-to-end product and service offerings while enabling customer stickiness. It will provide us a platform to roll out numerous other services, including cloud computing, SaaS, and managed applications. We believe we are on a track to achieve our vision, thereby maximizing shareholder value."
With facility under control, the company chalked out the game plan to build this huge entity. Tulip planned to invest in creating the first-of-its-kind tier-4 data center facility spreading across an area of 9 lakh sq ft with a total investment of `900 crore.
"We wanted to give India a data center which not only is ahead in its race, but also abreast with the latest technologies with its grandeur and strength. We wanted to provide a platform for services including cloud computing, SaaS, IaaS, UC, and managed applications apart from storage capabilities," insists Harjyot Soni, CTO, Tulip Telecom.
Architects of the Structure
To give a massive thought a grand structure needed a huge support from others. Tulip's success in setting up this facility cannot be fully observed without the contribution from its various associates or partners. Tulip teamed with industry leaders like IBM, HP, Cisco, EMC, Schneider Electric, Emerson, Panduit, and Corning among others to build the facility.
Schnabel of Germany was the design review consultant for the data center.
Tulip chose IBM as its strategic partner and Schnabel as a peer review consultant to give shape to its dream. As per the contract, IBM provided design consultancy services for the overall data center space along with turnkey execution to build the first phase of the data center. IBM's consulting and design services helped Tulip to bring forth a range of data center technologies including power, cooling, rack layout, chillers, UPS/DG sets, and more in its endeavor. Emerson, Schneider Electric, and APC have been partnered with for provision of UPS.
"IBM used its Enterprise Modular Data Center (EMDC) design for Tulip, a part of the IBM Data Center Family, to deliver a comprehensive set of capabilities. Also, IBM has built Tulip's data center as a turnkey system integrator to ensure that design objectives of energy efficiency and scalability are achieved," said Ashish Kumar, general manager,
IBM Global Technology Services India/South Asia in a press release issued by both parties.
Tulip remains the primary bandwidth provider for this facility, however, since Tulip Data City is a service provider acoustic data center, all domestic and global telcos are being approached to connect to this facility.
What it Holds
Currently, Tulip offers for co-location, managed hosting, data storage, and a suite of other complementary services including managed security services and storage to its customers through its 5 data centers. Given the immense potential of the data center market in India and the fast rate of growth in this space, Tulip rose to its glory with this grand step.
This data center is built to meet the rising customer requirements from across verticals. "We are aiming at covering a range of clients from various sectors but banking, telecom, and enterprise will be our key target areas for this facility," confirms Bedi.
Some of the key features you can come across for this facility are related to key initiatives took in various advanced technologies used for this data center. This eco-friendly data center is housing up to 16,000 racks, backed by up to 100 MW power supply.
Sharing the details of the data center, Soni says, "The entire building has a floor load bearing capacity of 15,00 kg per sq m. This data center is ISO 20000-1 & 27001 certified and is designed as per Seismic Zone 4 specifications with raised floors, precision air-conditioning with accurate temperature, and humidity control systems with separate cooling zones."
Tulip Data City boasts power utilization effectiveness (PUE) of 1.5x v/s the global average of ~2.2x. It is likely to consume 80-100 MW of power v/s 130-140 MW used by similar data centers. "To minimize the consumption of power, the facility has been equipped with day/night security cameras, which make it possible to operate at minimal lighting conditions. Use of other energy sources like photo voltaic, heat pumps, and evaporative cooling enables this data center to reduce traditional power consumption," explains Bedi.
It is also delivering cloud solutions in order to cater to the always-changing data and connectivity needs of today's enterprises and the government sector. The company tied up with Polycom for providing unified communication facility to add to its portfolio in the data center. The facility is not only hosting servers, but also giving facility of IaaS. "We are currently giving IaaS through this facility to Zapak, Matrix Cellular, and many more," says Bedi.
The facility will serve the hosting, co-location, storage, and bandwidth needs of large, small, and medium businesses in the region, while also serving as a disaster recovery facility for enterprises across the world.
Smart Move
With this data center, Tulip has been able to set the highest service delivery standards in data center services with its mature service delivery practices and security standards.
Tulip's strategy is to sign up large system integrators and service providers, which in turn sell the data center services to businesses and other customers.
"We have spent close to `400 crore on this facility so far, and the remaining `500 crore will be invested in this endeavor for the next five years on upgrading this facility with the latest technologies and innovations," confirms Bedi.
Currently, this data center has bagged 3 clients for hosting servers: HP, IBM, and NTT. HP is using around 10,000 sq ft of space for its servers and has an option of increasing it to 20,000 sq ft as part of the contract; IBM and NTT, on the other hand, is using close to 5,000 sq ft of space each.
"Tulip will benefit from economies of scale, as other third-party data centers in India are typically smaller, with up to 175,000 sq ft of area," Bedi shares.
"It's barely few weeks that Tulip Data City was inaugurated; we are closing many more such deals in coming months with major LCUs as well as SMBs. We expect to fill one third of this facility by FY13," he declares.
The data center is already attracting both local businesses and foreign companies that have operations in the country. Customers in the Middle East and South East Asia are also looking to set up data recovery centers at the Tulip Data City.
Tulip will increase the raised floor space as the orders come in. It has already sold 16% of the raised floor space and by March next year it will have sold about 25% of the space. It hopes to achieve full capacity of 400,000 raised floor space in less than two years. Company also plans sell this facility off in the next three years' time.