Australian data centre spending to hit $2 billion in 2013: analyst

Spending on data centre hardware in Australia is projected to reach $2.09 billion this year due to the convergence of servers, storage and networking equipment according to one analyst firm.

Speaking at Gartner’s IT Infrastructure Operations and Data Centre Summit in Sydney, analyst Matthew Boon said that many companies are investing in storage and data centre infrastructure management tools so they can more effectively plan for customer needs.

“When you get new technology coming through that promises greater efficiencies and a more effective way of managing IT in general, it comes with a lot of benefits, but also a cost up front to plan for the future,” he said.

“What we are also seeing is a potential out of sequence replacement cycle as well, fuelled by the impact of the slowdown during the global financial crisis.”

According to Boon, the move towards converged infrastructure is also having an impact on data centre properties such as power and cooling.

A continuing issue for many companies in Australia is whether they build a new data centre or transform their existing centre, because many companies are close to or have already run out of space.

“A major focus for most organisations is planning what their data centre should be looking like for the next 10-20 years,” he said.

ATechnology plans ahead with data centre migration

Public cloud revenues to hit $2 billion by 2016:IDC

The future of data centre cooling

Cloud computing

High adoption rates of virtualization in Australia mean that a lot of organisations are looking at how they take the “next step” said Boon.

“A lot of organisations that virtualized are looking at how they take that next step and move towards either a private or public cloud style infrastructure environment, or indeed a combination of the two using a hybrid approach.”

Turning to cloud adoption rates in Australia, he estimated that 40 per cent of organisations have in place the groundwork for cloud computing principles.

From an enterprise perspective, most of the investment is in internal adoption of private cloud .

“Leading on from what enterprises have done with virtualization, they are now thinking further down the track to potentially moving towards a wider public cloud style of deployment,” Boon said.

“It is very application driven; if you look at the big banks for example, they are not going to put their core banking applications into the cloud, largely due to legislation and data sovereignty issues.”

However, small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) were planning to move towards a public cloud environment, particularly infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds.

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU, or take part in the Computerworld conversation on LinkedIn: Computerworld Australia