Australian organisations are forecast to spend $1.77 billion on data centre technology in 2013 as companies look to upgrade old facilities or invest in new data centres, according to Gartner research.
The analyst firm found there are currently 64,521 data centres in Australia. However, the majority (53,087) are classed as a single site while 11,095 are computer rooms. In addition, 243 facilities are classified as midsized data centres, 85 as enterprise data centres and 10 as large facilities.
Gartner Australia managing vice president Matthew Boon said that many companies have almost or have already run out of space so a major focus is what their data centre will look like in the next 10 to 20 years.
“One of the biggest trends we are seeing in Australia is a shift towards converged infrastructure where servers, storage and networking are converged into a single environment. This is having an impact on the sort of data centres organisations are building and how they power or cool the facilities.”
He added converged infrastructure could promise greater efficiencies and a more effective way of managing IT in general, but it comes with a cost up front to plan for the future.
“What we are seeing is a potential out of sequence replacement cycle as well, fuelled by the impact of the slowdown during the global financial crisis.”
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However, an IDC report entitled Australia and New Zealand Third Party Datacentre Ecosystem released in July which surveyed 420 end users found that financial constraints have led some organisations to use third-party data centre services.
When asked why they had moved into a third-party data centre, 24 per cent indicated that they did not have the capital expenditure to build a new data centre or renovate an existing facility.
“Sixteen per cent moved because they indicated they were concerned about up time and redundancy,” IDC A/NZ infrastructure research manager Doctor Glen Duncan said.
“Another 16 per cent indicated that they didn’t think they would have the power in their data centres to move forward.”
Less than 4 per cent of respondents said data centre end of life issues led them to choose off premises computing.
Of those companies using off premise computing, 54 per cent were either looking for a new data centre provider or were going to maintain their existing data centre.
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