Citing the latest IDC research, which predicts a growing fall in the number of server rooms globally, Roel Castelein, Customer Services Director, at The Green Grid argues that legacy server rooms are failing to keep pace with new workload types and causing organisations to seek alternative solutions.
“It wasn’t too long ago that the main data exchanges going through a server room were email and file storing processes, where 2-5KW racks was often sufficient. But as technology has grown, so have the pressures and demands placed on the data centre. Now, we’re seeing data centres equipped with 10-12KW racks to better cater for modern-day requirements, with legacy data centres falling further behind.
“IoT, social media, and the number of personal devices now accessing data are just a handful of factors that are pushing the demands of compute power and energy consumption, which is causing further pressures on legacy server rooms used within the enterprise. As a result, more organisations are now shifting to cloud-based services, dominated by the likes of Google and Microsoft, and also colo facilities. This trend is not only reducing carbon footprints, but also guarantees that the environment organisations are buying into are both energy efficient and equipped for higher server processing.”
In IDC’s latest report, ‘Worldwide Datacenter Census and Construction 2014-2018 Forecast: Aging Enterprise Datacenters and the Accelerating Service Provider Buildout’, it claims that while the industry is at a record high of 8.6 million data centre facilities, after this year, there will be a significant reduction in server rooms. This is due to the growth and popularity of public cloud based services, occupied by the large hyperscalers including AWS, Azure and Google, which is expected to grow to 400 hyperscale data centres globally by the end of 2018. Roel continued:
“While server rooms are declining, this won’t affect the data centre industry as a whole. The research identified that data centre square footage is expected to grow to 1.94bn, up from 1.58bn in 2013. And with hyperscale and colo facilities offering new services in the form of high-performance compute (HPC) and Open Compute Project (OCP), more organisations will see the benefits in having more powerful, yet energy efficient IT solutions that meet modern technology requirements.”
