Megafon, one of Russia’s leading mobile operators, leaked to the media last week that it plans to launch data processing centers by 2013 in each of Russia’s federal districts – the eight supra-regional territorial formations created in 2000 to ease the governance of a country that spans nine time zones.
According to a report by CNews.ru, a Russian portal covering IT and telecom topics, each district center will be a 1,000 sq. m. modular unit and will contract out physical and virtual servers as well as apps on an SaaS basis. The latter will reportedly be available from MegaFon’s existing premises even before the actual launch of the data center network.
In addition to running commercial clients’ data, the centers will also develop MegaFon’s own data systems for internal use, CNews.ru reports.
The operator built its first data center in Novosibirsk in 2009 to cover the vast Siberian, Ural and Far East market. This was followed by the Volga area’s Samara center, Russia’s largest at that time. The current expansion plan calls for a broader network to include the Moscow region, St. Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Yekaterinburg and Khabarovsk.
The Russian data center market is growing very fast, with commercial services in the field estimated at $200 million for 2011. Last month Rostelecom, the Russian national telecom operator, launched the construction of a mega data center in Moscow. The server rooms will occupy some 10,000 sq. m. – twice as much as Sberbank’s existing mega data center in the capital.
