With growing economic and technological transformations today, data have emerged as the most essential component for developing any business. Cashing in on the thriving need for storing data, Bangladesh is eyeing a boom in data centre business.
As of now, only one private data centre named Colocity of Ispahani group is functioning in the market. However, at least five more data centres are going to be established in the next one year.
Large corporates such as Summit Communications, Square Informatix, Mir Telecom, fiber@homes, and Kazi IT are investing in building such centres in order to cash in on the data business, which is the next big business idea.
Besides private players, the government too is going to establish the largest Tier-4 data centre for commercial and industrial data business in Gazipur’s Kaliakair Park. The government is going to rent out the centre to the industry, earning money for the national exchequer in the process.
Commercial plans
Talking to The Independent, Tareq Barkatullah, director of National Data Centre, said the current storage capacity of the centre housed at the Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC) at Agargaon is two petabytes.
“When the National Data Centre was inaugurated in 2010, its storage capacity was 30 terabytes. It took nearly four years to expand that capacity to 750 terabytes, and another couple of years to further increase it to two petabytes,” Barkatullah said.
“This two-petabyte capacity is being used to meet the demand of government entities. The increase of data flow from different government entities has increased manifold in the past couple of years. Such data range from information on taxpayers to files from different ministries and regulatory bodies. As such, the volume of data being stored in the data centre is huge,” he added.
In addition, financial data of Bangladesh Bank and commercial banks are stored in the data centre, which demands an increase in the capacity of the data centre, he said.
Barkatullah informed that a National Disaster Data Recovery Centre (NDDRC) was being set up in Jessore as a backup for the National Data Centre to ensure that important data is not lost during natural calamities or other emergencies.
The NDDRC will be housed in the Software Technology Park (STP), which is under construction in Jessore. Following preliminary assessment, the Jessore site has been declared as low risk for natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and wildfires—a crucial factor for setting up a recovery data centre, he said.
The Investment Corporation of Bangladesh (ICB) along with some state-owned banks—Sonali Bank, Janata Bank, Agrani Bank, Rupali Bank, Bangladesh Development Bank and Sadharan Bima Corporation—have provided funds for establishing the NDDRC, he added.
“Now, the new Tier-4 data centre in Kaliakair National Park, will be rented out to commercial entities such as banks, research centres and different business organizations,” he said, adding that the Tier-4 data centre will be the fifth of its kind. Tier-4 data centres are the largest type of data centres.
Barkatullah said the centre will be established on a 175,000-square-feet area with around 8,000–9,000 racks at a cost of Tk. 1,199.35 crore. For the uninitiated, a data centre rack is a type of steel and electronic framework designed to house servers, networking devices, cables and other data computing equipment.
Private sector initiatives
Talking to The Independent, Atiqullah Sayed, manager of the lone private sector data centre Colocity, said they had established the entity way back in 2007 to cater to the growing market demand for data storage.
“We have over 40 clients, including commercial banks, multinational companies (MNC), insurance companies, telcos and others,” Sayed said.
He said their data centre was spread over 10,000 square feet and has around 160 racks. The physical structure of a rack provides equipment placement and orchestration in a data centre facility, he added.
Sayed said as of now, Colocity was the lone commercial data centre service provider. “There are other data centres owned by some of the large commercial banks and telecommunication companies, but they are not being used for commercial purposes,” he added.
About the advent of new players in the market, he said, “This market will grow in a geometric manner in near future. There is business for all.
What lies ahead?
Data centre specialist Mahbubul Haque, who has worked in Morgan Stanley’s data centre in Seattle for over a decade, told The Independent that the market for data centres will witness an exponential growth in Bangladesh.
“Growing e-commerce businesses, start-ups and large enterprises alike expect data centre companies to host their IT infrastructure so that a company can use whatever is needed (like real estate, connectivity, IT systems, etc.) on a subscription basis,” he said.
Haque said more and more companies were becoming aware of disaster recovery of data, resulting in their approaching data centres. “There is an accelerating shift of IT services from traditional enterprise data centres to co-location, managed services and consuming IT as a service.”
He said that consumption of IT as a service was driving new technologies that can be broadly referred to as software-defined everything (SDE). “This (SDE) is changing the way networks are built and managed. It enhances agility and security with reduced operational costs and complexity in networks,” he added.