Bigger Campuses, Everywhere: Global Growth of Data Centers at NTT

The growth of the Internet economy has been a global phenomenon, requiring digital infrastructure across the globe. Data center operators have expanded their operations to meet this demand for computing capacity.

“Growth is everywhere,” said Bruno Berti, senior vice president of product at NTT Global Data Centers Americas (GDCA). “It’s global. We have seen a significant increase in our European activities. We are seeing significant demand in the Americas, but also in Asia and India. This is an unprecedented request. »

Managing data center demand across the world was a key strategic objective behind the creation of NTT Global Data Centers, which brought together 28 IT brands owned by NTT Communications, including data center providers RagingWire, e- shelter, Gyron, Netmagic, NTT Nexcenter and Digital Port. Asia. The combined company is the world’s third-largest data center company, behind Equinix and Digital Realty, with 6 million square feet of data center space in 20 countries.

DCF Editor Rich Miller recently spoke with Berti about NTT’s global data center operations. Here is the video of our conversation, made with NTT Global Data Centers Americas:

TRANSCRIPTION:

Rich Miller, Data Center Frontier: We’re talking here about the dynamic changes we’re seeing in the data center and cloud computing market, and my guest today is Bruno Berti. The digital economy has truly become a global growth story. What does the global nature of Internet growth mean for NTT? How do you work with that as a business?

Bruno Berti, Senior Vice President of Product at NTT GDCA: One of the things that surprised us all was that digital transformation was already happening, but I think the pandemic really accelerated that to a level that none of us expected. One of the first types of customers who really saw this were hyperscale users. They started looking more to colocation providers to really help them with some of that capacity glut, as we call it, that they hadn’t anticipated.

And this glut was not just in the Americas, it was global. One of the things we started to see was (hyperscale customers) buying bigger footprints around the world because companies like ours that were global in nature had capabilities in the markets they were looking for. Although hyperscalers recognized it earlier, companies are starting to see it now. We do not expect any slowdown in this demand. We actually see this happening globally for probably the next few years at a minimum.

Rich Miller: Some analysts say the United States has been at the forefront of internet and global growth. What are the areas where you’ve seen a lot of activity and a lot of interest in data center capacity?

Bruno Berty: Capacity and growth are everywhere. It’s global. We have seen a significant increase in our activities in Europe. We are seeing significant demand in the Americas, but also in Asia and India. Unprecedented demand is being captured in these markets. Once you do business with someone, if you make it easy, if you have consistency, if you have a mechanism by which you can add additional services – not just in the Americas, but globally – it really accelerates that request and actually makes it easier and faster for companies to do business with us. In the markets where we are building our data centers and where we have capacity, we are seeing demand being absorbed at a faster rate. So we’re making more land reserves, we’re looking at bigger campuses, and we’re also looking at bigger buildings to be able to accommodate that growth and that large-scale demand globally, and also the demand from businesses .

Rich Miller: How does this global growth factor into how customers are consuming capacity? It looks like demand from multinational customers is really exploding.

Bruno Berty: Most of the customers we do business with are global in nature and we cater to their global needs. But what we’re noticing is that some of the companies that aren’t already global are accelerating their demand to reach global markets. So having that capability and that global footprint has really been a key differentiator. And one thing that’s different from some of our competitors is that we started with four top regional companies that really knew what those markets were. Right? So there was RagingWire in the Americas, we have equivalents in Europe and India in Asia-Pacific, and we know those markets very well.

What NTT has done is bring a global dimension to these top regional companies. Unlike some of our competitors who expand beyond their regions, we are already in those regions. So that allows us to act locally and really meet the needs of those regional markets, but then think globally and make sure that we’re also meeting all the global needs of those customers.

Rich Miller: You talked about how quickly some of these campuses fill some of these fast-growing international markets. What do you see for global growth and how do NTT’s capabilities and resources enable you to meet some of the demand?

Bruno Berty: We were building 8 megawatt buildings in the past, then 16 megawatt buildings. Now 36 megawatts is our smallest building. We don’t even talk about buildings anymore, Rich. When we enter a new market, when we consider an expansion, it always starts with a campus methodology. The other thing, which is really a pretty big differentiator for NTT, is that NTT is really known as a telecommunications network provider. Along with having those campuses and those buildings and that capacity, there’s also the interconnection of all those data centers and the ability to provide that interconnection to customers without having to think about it separately.

Rich Miller: You mentioned the importance of a campus strategy. How does it work how? I imagine it is several buildings. How do you approach this?

Bruno Berty: For people who may not be familiar with the campus approach, it’s no longer about picking up a safe and figuring out where the racks go. It’s really about taking this campus and figuring out where the construction needs to go, where’s the retail, where’s the wholesale, where’s the buildings or the large-scale capacity? It kind of made my job a lot more fun and a lot more complex. I’m dealing with 3D and complex Rubik’s cubes, as opposed to the simple two-dimensional question “where do the racks go”? It’s been a big change for us, and NTT is really this global player that allows us to better meet these needs.

Rich Miller: It really looks like a lot of fun and a big challenge. There’s so much going on in the world of technology, and digitization brings many new ways to do just about everything. As a product manager, what do you see on the horizon and what kind of products and services you can offer your customers to try to help them serve their global audience?

Bruno Berty: We’re talking about new cooling technologies now – in fact, we’re talking to customers about putting liquid directly on their chips. We had never done this before. Now we have solutions to achieve this. It used to be that sustainability just meant being more efficient at saving us money. Now we really do sustainability to make a difference and offer different solutions. We solve these types of needs and even look at different power distribution technologies. We used to provide 208/120 (for the nerds out there, that’s just standard power). Now our customers want direct 480 feeds, straight from our medium voltage transformer. So that’s really a game-changer, and technology is driving some of these changes that we’re seeing inside the data center.

We actually had a customer who didn’t want their equipment in a rack. We had to offer them an on-shelf solution because it was denser. But then we had to figure out how to contain that (configuration) to make sure we weren’t mixing cold air and hot air, and we were able to cool their servers.

It’s something we’ve never thought of before, but it’s really changing the industry. So many things are happening. That’s a lot of change to try to get an idea.