Voice of the Enterprise: Datacentre findings - enterprise investment and capacity metrics

THE LATEST FINDINGS show healthy spending, with 25% of organisations planning to increase their spending on facilities equipment.

Respondents identified their preferred vendors across seven equipment and software categories, including PDU, UPS and DCIM. Colocation and whole- sale providers are becoming an increasingly important part of how enterprises deploy their production applications.

Additionally, respondents were asked about current utilisation of their facilities, and where they expect to deploy in the future – whether on their own premises or in a colocation or cloud service provider facility.

Datacentre facility spending is flat or increasing for most organisations, and current projects are serving a variety of business needs – primarily retrofits and upgrades, although some shops are consciously limiting investment in non-strategic datacentres.

If more capacity is needed, building a new datacentre is not the top answer these days; more likely, choices are infrastructure consolidation, cloud or colocation. Although 15% of those surveyed expect to open a new datacentre in the next quarter, another 15% are also closing sites. In the long term, datacentre operators are doubtful they’ll invest in many new facilities five to 10 years into the
future, given the heavy capital expenditure required and the proliferation of viable alternatives such as colocation
and cloud.

There is spending
Echoing other reassuring messages about a recovering economy, we heard none of the horror stories of draconian budget slashing that were all too familiar during the last few years. Also, despite increased spending at colocation and cloud service providers, a quarter of organisations surveyed plan to increase spending on datacentre facilities equipment in the next 90 days. mSome are increasing spending dramatically to complete building projects; many are investing in upgrading and modernising long-neglected facilities. Rack, cabling and power equipment were the main areas of focus for this increased spending.

Schneider Electric and Emerson Network Power were noted as preferred vendors across most equipment categories. These vendors will likely benefit from the increase in spending, particularly at larger, premium datacentres.

Priority projects
There are a variety of projects at the top of datacentre ‘to do’ lists right now, with most focusing on either moves or efficiency efforts. Datacentre moves and migrations (37%), retrofits and upgrades (36%), DCIM deployment (32%) and site consolidation (30%) were the most frequently mentioned projects. Some replacement projects reflect pent-up demand after a few lean budget years.

Savvy organisations are prioritising investment in datacentres to the disadvantage of older facilities, funding only lower-dollar projects that are absolutely necessary in datacentres that are not part of the strategic plan. The datacentre is making a seismic shift from being a ‘must have’ to a ‘might have’ in many cases, and priorities necessarily reflect the chosen strategic direction. Current capacity and investment
Many of our experts stated that they do not expect to be investing in datacentres five to 10 years from now. However, 25% of respondents said if capacity were lacking, they’d build a datacentre in the short term.
Across most organisations, capacity simply is not lacking; virtualisation and consolidation continue to create available space in datacentres. Datacentre operators report an average of 63% square-footage utilisation, and 56% power utilisation; infrastructure consolidation is the top choice for what to do if capacity were lacking.

Some datacentre managers even boast of having extra space and are finding ways to use it productively – where possible for other IT purposes – reluctant to relinquish the space in case they need it after all.
Consolidation and efficiency certainly are nothing new, but the trend is clearly still alive and well. It is worth noting, however, the emergence of the need for more localised sites to handle the huge increase in data that is driven by the Internet of Things across consumer and business applications.
Buildouts of these remote sites has yet to show itself meaningfully in the data, but as those workloads become more mainstream, we may see a resurgence in the need
for local compute in conjunction with centralised sites.

To build or not to build
Building a new datacentre requires a huge capital expenditure, as well as ongoing maintenance, in a financial climate that heavily favors opex. Plus, there’s growing recognition that running a datacentre might not be everybody’s core strength, which is difficult not to think about given the recent proliferation of purpose-built, state-of-the-art, professionally managed datacentres around the globe that offer cost-effective datacentre environments if and when they are needed. As one commentator in a metro area observed: “Datacentres are popping up out here like dandelions.”

Multiple options – cloud, colo, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, hosting – are swimming in a vast ocean into which any company can dip unlimited buckets to quickly fill capacity needs. Even if organisations are not taking advantage of that ocean of capacity yet, its very existence is helping to dampen enthusiasm for expensive building projects.

For more information on the Voice of the Enterprise: Datacentres Q2 2015 study,go to https://451research.com/report-long?icid=3449