Russia’s young commercial data center market reached some $167 million last year with a yearly growth of over 20%, according to a report by Moscow-based consultancy Direct INFO, as reported by Russia Beyond The Headlines (RBTH).
Other consultancies (PMR and J’son & Partners) have put the figures at more than $300 million.
The market is being stimulated by Russian legislation, which forbids storing the personal data of Russian citizens on servers located abroad, starting from September 2015 (see white paper by EWDN and EY)
The development of cloud computing, e-commerce, B2G (business-to-government) applications and other services are other growth drivers of this market, which is still at an early stage.
“When I came to Moscow in 2008, I wondered where the data was. There were five or six very basic Tier I to maybe Tier II level commercial data centers that were largely operated by systems integrators. The country lacked skillsets to build and operate modern data centers,” recalls David Hamner, chairman of DataSpace, an American owned and managed Tier III facility in Moscow.
Now Russia has no fewer than 180 data centers, more than a hundred of which are located in the capital.
Total number of commercial data centers in Russia (2009-2014)
Source: PMR
A virtual server in 50 seconds
Several powerful facilities are operated by foreign companies or companies with foreign management, like DataSpace or iXcellerate. The latter, a London-headquartered company, owns an IBM Level 3-compliant data center in Moscow and plans to build others in the region.
Strong domestic players, meanwhile, are also in the running. One of them, Selectel, has six Tier III data centers in Moscow and St. Petersburg. This past spring, the company launched a “virtual private cloud” (VPC) storage service to address corporations’ needs to host complex business applications.
In late August, Selectel launched a new cloud hosting platform, christened Vscale, targeting the growing developer community.
“This service lets you create a reliable, high-performance virtual server in less than 50 seconds,” Head of PR Alexander Vechersky told East-West Digital News. Claiming that Vscale is the only public cloud platform of its kind in the world, Selectel will promote this offer both in Russia and abroad.
Siberia’s cold good for your data
Meanwhile, the first data centers have appeared in Siberia and the Russian Far East, which can prove advantageous in terms of climate and access to energy. Thus, earlier this year, a Siberian company managed to attract $250 million from a local investor to build the first commercial data center in Omsk. The center is scheduled for completion, with a total area of 10,000 sq. m. and a capacity of 2,000 racks, in 2018.
“We want to enter the international market after receiving a Tier III certificate,” Dmitry Butsik, co-founder of the data center and president of Siberia IT Cluster, told RBTH.
According to Butsik, the data center in Omsk will be competitive due to the low cost of its services. “Firstly, we have the cost in rubles. Secondly, the Siberian climate allows saving on a re-cooling system, since cooling is required only three months a year,” he explained to RBTH.
Another large data center is being planned in the Far East, within the framework of the future IT park in the Republic of Yakutia, reports RBTH.
This initiative follows the example of the Kazan IT-Park, a major tech hub 800 km east from Moscow, which launched its own data center in 2011.
