Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Thursday, March 28, 2024

Business Growth, Storage Drive Datacenter Expansion 

Most medium-sized enterprises surveyed in a datacenter demand study said they intend to go with a mix of on-premise, outsourced, co-located, hosted and cloud-based IT operations.

The survey also found that storage growth prompted by a business uptick was driving demand for datacenter capacity. Meanwhile, considerations like energy efficiency continue to take a backseat to datacenter connectivity and resilience, the survey found.

The datacenter demand survey conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by Digital Realty Trust, which acts as a kind of datacenter broker, defined "mid-market" as companies with up to $500 million in revenues. Most survey respondents defined themselves as high-tech, manufacturing, retail, financial or business services providers.

"Our mid-market clients are increasingly seeking a single source for all their datacenter requirements, including not just power, space, cooling, and connectivity, but also access to strategic partners such as cloud services, network services and managed service providers," explained Digital Realty's Bill Stein.

Among the key drivers for adding datacenter capacity was a combination of "IT sprawl" and business growth; 46 percent of respondents told Forrester they were considering a new datacenter or colocation options as a way to consolidate IT infrastructure.

Among the other reasons for adding capacity were outdated datacenters (41 percent), lack of capacity (38 percent), regional or global expansion (31 percent) and energy efficiency (25 percent).

Indeed, datacenter expansion plans remain aggressive, the survey found. Asked about expansion plans, fully 88 percent of the 233 North American executives surveyed said they would be investing in a new datacenter over the next four years or expanding a current facility.

While business growth was cited by more than half of the survey respondents as the key driver for datacenter capacity growth, other drivers included (in order of significance) storage growth, the rise of big data, virtualization and the proliferation of applications.

The majority of the companies surveyed said they still own and operate their primary datacenters, while about one-third were "fully outsourced." Bringing up the rear, at least for now, were Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and cloud computing platforms, which accounted for just 21 percent of primary datacenters.

But IaaS and cloud platforms increasingly figure into the future expansion plans of the medium-sized companies surveyed. Twenty-two percent of respondents said they were planning to use infrastructure and cloud services while the same percentage was considering co-location options.

Surprisingly, datacenter energy efficiency ranked in the middle of the most important features desired in future datacenters. Some 71 percent of respondents considered energy considerations to be "very important" while 61 percent listed access to sustainable energy sources.

The datacenter feature cited by the most respondents, 82 percent, was network connectivity options along with carrier availability and density.

Asked about measuring datacenter power usage effectiveness, 42 percent said they don't currently track PUE but planned to in the future. (PUE was dismissed as unimportant by 19 percent of those polled.)

Curiously, the survey revealed that of those who claimed to measure PUE, nearly three-quarters said they did not know the energy efficiency rating at their primary facility. The median for those who did know was 2.0.

Forrester said it surveyed more than 1,000 companies in North America, Europe, Asia/Pacific, and Australia earlier this year.

About the author: George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

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