Data centres 2020

Data centres: what are the trends and market forces that will shape their development over the coming five-to-ten years? Anyone appraising the data centre business during the recession at the beginning of this decade would have been far from assured about its long-term prospects. Dot-com boom and bust had resulted in industry-wide disaffection toward data centres, and many ClOs were left convinced that the best place for enterprise applications and data was on enterprise's own servers and storage devices.Data centre operators, and the vendors who supply the racks, cabling, servers, air conditioning and ventilation units, are doing nicely, and the market make-up is such that there is still room for product differentiation, with (to date) minimal consolidation. Ironically, the most recent economic straitening has been beneficial for the data centre market, as other business sectors find ways to trade more cost-efficiently online, and IT departments migrate toward 'Cloud'-based models that are hosted largely on third-party servers.