DDN to invest Rs. 500 cr to make data storage products

New Delhi: The US-based DataDirect Networks (DDN),to invest around Rs 500 crore in the next five years for manufacturing data storage solutions in India, a senior company official said on Wednesday.

The company expects to start rolling out commercial products from its Delhi-based manufacturing unit from mid-December, which it will scale to achieve 100 petabytes storage capacity by mid-2022 with an initial investment of Rs 100 crore, DDN Storage General Manager for India and Southeast Asia Atul Vidwansa said. "We have a factory in place with around 250 people. We expect to roll out the first product from our factory in India from mid-December. Initially, we will make an investment of Rs 100-250 crore to begin, which we will continue doing for five years to a cumulative investment of Rs 500 crore," Vidwansa said.

DDN is evaluating participation in the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme for IT hardware. The company is also exploring to partner with some of the electronics contract manufacturers who have qualified for the scheme. Vidwansa said that the company makes final products used by end-customers by using components from partners and scaling up production speed of DDN's manufacturing plant will be dependent on pace at which the company's partner ramp up their supplies in India.

DDN's manufacturing unit in India, will be its first facility outside the US. The company will make storage solutions to meet the need of the high-performance computing segment, cloud business and data centres in India. "We measure capacity in terms of petabytes (PB), terabytes (TB) shipped from the factory. Initially, we plan to ship about 100PB per year from our factory in India by mid-2022 and we plan to scale it up to 500 PB from early-2023," Vidwansa said.