This article is more than 1 year old

NTT adds two bit barns to gathering global cloud

Embiggens RagingWire and plans new build in Mumbai

NTT is continuing to expand its global cloud footprint, last week announcing plans for major new data centres in America and India.

In Sacramento, according to Data Center Knowledge, subsidiary RagingWire is the expansion vehicle, with a third campus that added 180,000 square feet (with 14 MW of power capacity) to its existing half-million square feet.

The power capacity of the complex now totals 52.7 MW.

Over in Mumbai, the company yesterday announced plans to splash US$100 million on a DC due to enter service before the end of the year.

The build will be under control of local subsidiary Netmagic Solutions (in which NTT bought a 74 per cent stake in 2012).

Mumbai is to get 300,000 square feet of space, sufficient to house around 3,000 server racks, with as much as 28 MW of power.

The Mumbai facility will operate as a carrier-neutral centre, and will be NTT's ninth in India.

While it's an enterprise player both under its own name and various subsidiaries, chiefly Dimension Data, NTT told Data Centre Knowledge it still maintains a sales strategy of attracting customers with colocation and using that to build contact for cloud services and enterprise consulting.

The Japanese giant has spent some years – and plenty of Yen – buying up muscle in various countries. That ambition drove the 2013 acquisitions of Virtela (for US$525 million) and RagingWire (US$350 million), as well as buying into UK data centre services outfit Gyron for an undisclosed sum. Its subsidiary Dimension Data has also been embiggening its footprint.

DiData is also home to a major NTT VMware push: the OpSource cloud that NTT had a minority stake in was rolled into Dimension Data in 2012, to create its Cloud Solutions platform using VMware hypervisors.

Other slurps since 2008 include Keane and managed security services company Solutionary.

NTT is also the third-largest data centre provider in Europe, courtesy of the US$800 million acquisition of German company e-shelter. At that time, NTT said it was having trouble building data centres fast enough, making acquisition a better option.

However, while international revenue is in the order of US$15 billion, that still leaves the nearly-US$90 billion business heavily weighted to the slow-growth Japanese market.

If Silicon Valley Watcher's 2014 report is correct, those years of investment have given the giant what it considers to be a “full stack” of infrastructure and services.

That would put a premium on ramping up the bottom layer of the stack, so as to support expansion of its cloudy customer base.

The growing scale of the NTT cloud is also behind its interest in software-defined networking: the company is a member of the ON.Lab project, and earlier this year took part in a cross-carrier network function virtualisation demo.

Earlier this year, NTT also added extra security clout to its UK business with the buy of Nebulas. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like