CIOIN

Worldwide datacentre hardware spending is expect to hit $US98.9 billion in 2011, up 12.7 per cent, according to analyst firm Gartner.

Locally, spending on datacentre hardware is expected to reach $1.83 billion in 2011, up 8.8 percent from 2010. Hardware spending includes servers, storage and enterprise datacentre networking equipment.

The total number of datacentres in Australia in 2011 is approximately 49,418 although only 10 of these are classed as large datacentres -- maintaining more than 500 racks of equipment. The analyst firm anticipates consolidation will reduce this figure by about 4000 in 2015.

Datacentre hardware spending is forecast to total $US106.4 billion in 2012, and surpass $US126.2 billion in 2015.

Gartner analyst, Jon Hardcastle, said storage will be the main driver for growth. Datacentres with more than 500 racks of equipment will also increase their spending from 20 per cent in 2010 to 26 per cent in 2015 thanks to cloud computing and the shift from internal datacentre provisioning to external.

In 2010, two per cent of datacentres contained 52 percent of total data centre floorspace and accounted for 63 percent of data centre hardware spending. In 2015, two percent of datacentres will contain 60 percent of data centre floorspace and account for 71 percent of data centre hardware spending.

Hardcastle said traditional in-house enterprise datacentres were under attack thanks to virtualisation technologies, datacentres efficiency which is leading to higher system deployment densities and inhibiting demand for floor space; and the move to consolidated third-party data centres reducing the overall number of mid-size datacentres.