New racks, cables for aging and neglected data centres

Enterprises are shuttering their smaller data centres, but are opting to shift to larger upgraded facilities rather than shifting the whole shebang to the cloud.

451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Datacenters survey found that in Q2 a whacking 87 per cent of data centre operators in Europe and North America are maintaining or racking up their data centre spending. A quarter are planning to jack up spending within the next quarter.

Of those companies looking to increase spending, 37 per cent are looking to retrofit or upgrade existing data centres or projects. Almost two thirds of organisations would rather consolidate IT infrastructure than build out a new data centre.

Likewise, companies hitting the magic number of 75 per cent data centre utilisation are more inclined to look to colocation and cloud providers than build a new data centre.

Healthcare and finance industries are likely to show the most growth – after all, birth, death and taxes are the only inevitabilities in life. Increased spending is predicted for both medium and larger companies.

451 also detects a general urge to upgrade “aging equipment” and “neglected facilities, more for efficiency than raw computing horsepower. Rack and cabling, power kit and data centre infrastructure management software are the key shopping list items, researchers found.

Dan Harrington, Research Director at 451 Research, said in a statement: “To support growing business demands on IT, enterprises are freeing up budgets and investing in modernising neglected data centre facilities. Those equipment vendors with offerings that target enterprise clients’ larger premium sites will see the greatest opportunity.”

The drive for efficiency was paralleled in the push to more centralised data centres, “supplemented by colocation and cloud resources.” The next couple of years are likely to see smaller local datacentres and server rooms get the chop. This will see enterprises’ overall square footage of data centres remain flat worldwide. ®