by Angela Guess
According to a new article, “Just like the rich keep getting richer, the biggest data centers in the world keep getting bigger. And they’re spending more money on servers, storage, and networking. According to projections put together by the box-counters and prognosticators at Gartner, in 2010 about 2 per cent of data centers worldwide comprised 52 per cent of total floor space and 63 per cent of total spending on hardware. Fast forward five years, and in 2015 the top 2 per cent of data centers will make up 60 per cent of aggregate floor space and an astonishing 71 per cent of server, storage, and networking spending across all of the data centers in the world. That sure sounds like a whole lot of cloud-computing capacity is being added.”
The article adds, “But there are other factors at work. Jon Hardcastle, a research director at Gartner who follows data centers, said in a statement accompanying its data center spending projections, that the number of mid-sized data centers is shrinking as data center operators consolidate into mega-centers as cloud computing – it’s the app, man – is on the rise. Virtualization is also making data centers more efficient and denser in terms of the number of workloads and users that can be crammed into a given floor space, and this is actually holding back data center revenues, if you can believe it. Gartner is pretty optimistic that hardware spending in the data center is getting back to where it once belonged. And that is mostly thanks to an insatiable desire for storage capacity.”
