Data Center Consolidation Leads to Overall Market Growth

Recent data center research indicated that a growing number of enterprises plan to consolidate their facilities in 2014, which experts predict will drive significant growth within the data center industry.

Gartner data center research illustrated that technical, fiscal and service delivery concerns will change the way facility designers and operators create their strategies.

“Over the next five to 10 years, most organizations will need to change their approach to previous data center strategies used in the last five to seven years,” said Gartner research vice president Rakesh Kumar.

In this way, consolidation will increasingly become a main focus for businesses with a number of facilities. This falls in line with Gartner’s recently released data center research, which shows that the best strategy involves operating two data centers per continent with major business activity. As enterprises seek to cut costs and heed this method, a larger number will consolidate their facilities.

Technology for Consolidation
Organizations have several choices for data center centralization. According to an IT priorities survey conducted by TechTarget, which included 4,151 respondents within the business and data center sector, 42 percent stated that they plan to utilize a cloud infrastructure to address their consolidation needs. Furthermore, another 35 percent said they will use hosted server solutions.

Clive Longbottom, Quocirca co-founder and service director, told TechTarget that many enterprises look for solutions outside their own data center facilities. These options provide business clients the ability to centralize while offering increased flexibility and future scalability. By selecting to use the cloud or hosted servers, these organizations not only thin their own facilities, but also create larger growth within the data center sector.

Companies will seek to take advantage of the offerings of third-party vendors, which can provide the necessary cloud or hosted server technology for consolidation. While this strategy may reduce the overall number of facilities, it will create additional revenue streams for data center businesses offering these solutions.

Reasons for Consolidation
According to Longbottom, virtualization brought in the first wave of consolidation efforts within the data center market. As enterprises sought to centralize and lessen the cost of their facilities, this technology presented the most ideal solution. The cloud will be driving the next wave.

One of the main motivations to consolidate data center facilities is cutting costs. Experts have stated that the majority of businesses seeking to centralize do so to reduce operating expenditures.

“Data center consolidation is a way to reduce costs, [which is] important to those organizations that are still facing tight budgets,” Claunch told TechTarget. “It is also a useful project for all IT groups because anything that cuts the costs of operating and maintaining existing systems allows more of the budget to be applied to implementing new systems that innovate or deliver additional value to the overall business/organization.”

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