Worldwide data center hardware spending is
projected to reach $98.9 billion in 2011, up 12.7 percent from 2010 spending of
$87.8 billion, according to Gartner.

Data center hardware spending is forecast to total
$106.4 billion in 2012, and surpass $126.2 billion in 2015. Data center
hardware spending includes servers, storage and enterprise data center
networking equipment.

“Worldwide data center hardware spending will
finally reach and surpass 2008 levels,” said Jon Hardcastle, research
director at Gartner.

“Growth in emerging regions particularly
Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRIC countries) is balanced by continued
weakness relative to pre-downturn levels in Japan and Western Europe. Storage
is the main driver for growth. Although only a quarter of data center hardware
spending is on storage, almost half of the growth in spending will be from the
storage market,” Hardcastle added.

The very largest size category of data centers will
increase its share of spending from 20 percent in 2010 to 26 percent in 2015,
driven by the cloud and the shift from internal data center provision to
external.

In 2010, 2 percent of data centers contained 52
percent of total data center floorspace and accounted for 63 percent of data
center hardware spending. In 2015, 2 percent of data centers will contain 60
percent of data center floorspace and account for 71 percent of data center
hardware spending.

Traditional in-house enterprise data centers are
under attack from three sides. Firstly, virtualization technologies are helping
companies to utilize their infrastructure more effectively, inhibiting overall
system growth. Secondly, data centers are getting more efficient, leading to
higher system deployment densities and inhibiting demand for floor space.
Thirdly, the move to consolidated third-party data centers is reducing the
overall number of midsize data centers.

By Telecomlead.com Team
[email protected]