Data centre transformation won’t become a trend until 2013-2015: Report

New research indicates data centre transformation is being held back by a lack of mature technology and won’t become a mainstream trend until 2013 due to the cost of migration.

Industry analyst, Ian Brown, from Ovum conducted in house research on trends affecting CIOs and found while data centres are becoming increasingly popular, the changing role of the CIO has resulted in cost cutting becoming more of a priority than environmentally friendly policies.

“Organisations will expect CIOs not only to account for IT’s carbon footprint, but also implement systems and software that undertake the ‘carbon accounting’ for the whole enterprise,” Brown said in his report.

“CIOs have to keep costs in check, while poorly designed and maintained data centres result in increasing power usage to cool racks of ever more densely packed equipment.”

Brown said while data centre transformation has yet to become a trend, he expects its popularity will take off over the next five years.

“Indeed, we expect it to be one of four technology trends that will dominate the managed services landscape from a customer and supplier perspective over the next five years, along with sustainability, smart workplace, and cloud services,” Brown said.

The news comes as managing director of the Canberra Data Centre, Greg Boorer, told CIO the centre now provides data storage to 16 government departments and organisations.