Five Year Market Forecast for Data Centers
The rack server market for data center racks continues to be robust. The impetus that propels this market sector forward is the massive migration to cloud services by many organizations. The efficiency achievable through cloud server operations are extremely appealing, especially to medium-sized businesses that find it difficult to support IT budgets and expenses when they operate their own data centers.
With data management, size creates efficiency. According to DatacenterDynamics, data centers are currently experiencing a 15% annual growth rate and the expectation is that the data center construction market will grow from about $14.5 billion in 2014 to over $22 billion by 2019.
Drivers for Data Center Expansion
Due to migration to cloud services, data traffic is increasing as well as the need for more data storage. Additionally, in order to provide security, back-up, avoid downtime and have redundancy, companies are expanding their use of data centers in multiple global locations. There is a consistent “Rule of Three” in Internet security for mission critical applications. This applies to live Internet websites and services as well as to backups.
Companies learned the hard way that maintaining their own resilient data management services when everything stays in-house is a recipe for disaster. For example, in a natural disaster like a hurricane, if a company relies solely on a specific data center, whether it is their own or outsourced, when that data center goes down all the online functions of the company also go down. Sales and online communication stop. This is the type of disaster, which costs a company millions of dollars.
Redundancy for Mission Critical Applications
The solution to this is to have redundancy and two times redundancy is OK, but three times is much better especially when the data center locations are spread across the entire world. The key is to be able to “hot swap” services in real-time, so that this is not apparent to the users. This means live shifting of data center traffic loads and the ability to instantaneously pick up the traffic flows and redistribute the services should one of the redundant data centers go offline for any reason.
Price and Efficiency Improvements Continue
Reduced costs and increased efficiency help the continued expansion of data management services. The cost of equipment and bandwidth continue to decrease. Equipment and facilities are more energy-efficient. These trends combine with the need for more capacity and this is driving the expansion of data centers worldwide, which certainly is good news for the next five years at a minimum.
