The Cloud effect? Datacentres deployment will decline after 2016

A new forecast from IDC shows that the transition to the 3rd Platform is having a direct impact on datacentre construction and remodeling. The market analyst firm expects the total number of datacentres (all types) deployed worldwide will peak at 8.6 million in 2017 and then begin to decline slowly.

“This shift will be triggered by a decline in internal datacentre server rooms starting in 2016 and internal server closets starting in 2017,” IDC stated.

“All other datacentre categories will continue to grow throughout the forecast period, with the number of service provider datacentres increasing much faster.”

Despite a decline in the number of datacentres, total worldwide datacentre space will continue to increase, growing from 1.58 billion square feet in 2013 to 1.94 billion square feet in 2018.

The datacentre and server rooms/closets are no longer just the places where organisations house their IT assets. The datacentre must serve as the primary point of engagement and information exchange with employees, partners, and customers in today’s interconnected world.

The datacentre is also the foundation for new business models where leveraging large volumes of data and highly elastic compute resources are critical to delivering better insight and a superior product/user experience. This requires that datacentres reliably deliver large and highly variable amounts of transaction, content serving, and analytic capacity on time, with no delays and no excuses. In this environment, building and running datacentres as well as managing IT assets at the edge can no longer be a part-time or occasional job.

“Over the next five years, a majority of organisations will stop managing their own infrastructure,” explained Richard L. Villars, vice president, Datacenter and Cloud Research at IDC. “They will make greater use of on-premise and hosted managed services for their existing IT assets, and turn to dedicated and shared cloud offerings in service provider datacentres for new services. This will result in the consolidation and retirement of some existing internal datacentres, particularly at the low end. At the same time, service providers will continue their race to build, remodel, and acquire datacentres to meet the growing demand for capacity.”

The most significant development in datacentre construction is the growing importance of service provider mega datacentres, which are the primary server location for large collocation and cloud service providers.

By 2018, these mega datacentres will account for the vast majority (72.6 percent) of all service provider datacentre construction in terms of space while also accounting for 44.6 percent of all new high-end datacentre space around the world (up from 19.3 percent in 2013).

Similarly, the number of internal high-end datacenter environments, which typically require longer-term commitments of assets to build or refresh, will continue to grow throughout the forecast. Much of this growth can be attributed to continued strong datacentre construction in China and construction of large datacentres to replace smaller, more dispersed enterprise datacentres.

The continued buildout of larger datacentres ensures that actual internal datacentre space will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.4 percent over the forecast period and account for nearly one third of total worldwide datacenter space (all types) in 2018.