Data centre investment focuses on upgrades and retrofits

Both medium-sized and large organizations expect to increase spending on datacenters, with the most growth coming from healthcare and finance industries. The primary targets for this increased spending are rack and cabling, power equipment and datacenter infrastructure management software (DCIM).

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

Organizations surveyed cited Schneider Electric as their preferred provider in four out of seven facilities equipment and software categories, including universal power supplies (UPS), power distribution units (PDU), and racks and cabling, as well as DCIM. Emerson Network Power follows closely in many categories and is the number one preferred computer room air conditioning and air handling equipment provider. Other vendors that ranked highly include Carrier, Caterpillar, Eaton, HP and Trane.


Datacenter operators interviewed as part of this study provided detail regarding their need to modernize their facilities as well as invest in innovative technologies, such as DCIM, to run their facilities more efficiently.

“Spending has increased for infrastructure, data center infrastructure, upgrades. It's time to replace aging equipment. We have multiple facilities, so one facility will replace a couple of PDUs, another facility will replace CRAC units…” – Information/Technology Vertical, >1,000 Employees, >$5bn

“We selected Trellis for DCIM because they listen. Trellis has the ability to listen and change and adapt to the customer needs. They're nimble enough to listen.” – Information/Technology Vertical, >1,000 Employees, >$5bn

Organizations continue to consolidate their local datacenters and server rooms in favor of a more centralized model supplemented by colocation and cloud resources. Over the next two years, most organizations expect to close many of their smaller local datacenters and server rooms, indicating a continued trend toward fewer overall datacenter sites.

However, the number of premium, centralized datacenters – targets for datacenter consolidation and migration projects – is increasing. While there will be more, larger sites, the total overall datacenter square footage owned by enterprises is flat worldwide. Of those organizations increasing spending, 37% are doing so to support datacenter retrofits or upgrade projects. Existing datacenters will need to be upgraded, considering 62% of organizations would rather consolidate their IT infrastructure than build a new datacenter.

Colocation and Cloud Service Providers are Increasingly Important Deployment Venues

Survey respondents listed all their colocation and cloud service providers. The most frequently mentioned colocation and cloud service providers are:

Colos

Equinix

AT&T

Sunguard

CenturyLink

Digital Realty Trust

Cloud Service Providers

Amazon

Microsoft

Salesforce

Rackspace

Google

When organizations reach 75% datacenter utilization, they begin to evaluate the need for additional capacity. Those organizations are more likely to adopt colocation and cloud providers than to build a new datacenter. This is consistent with 451’s Datacenter Market Sizing Forecast Model, which shows the colocation market growing at 8% in Q2 2015 on a square footage basis. Colocation and wholesale providers are becoming more important to enterprises as they provide reliable and secure datacenter space and connectivity.

“Colocation and cloud service providers are well positioned to grow as enterprises require additional capacity and increasingly need to be more agile in responding to growing business demands. Facilities vendors who target colocation and cloud service providers also will benefit from this increased enterprise demand,”   concludes Dan Harrington.