Datacenter hardware to reach US$99B in 2011

Spending on datacenter hardware can reach US$98.9 billion this year, with storage because the main driver of growth, in step with a brand new forecast.

Gartner reported Thursday that world expenditure on datacenter hardware in 2011 is predicted to be a rise of twelve.7 p.c over 2010’s US$87.8 billion. Datacenter hardware covers servers, storage and enterprise datacenter networking equipment, said the analysis firm.

Jon Hardcastle, analysis director at Gartner, noted in a very statement that worldwide spending in datacenter equipment can “finally reach and surpass 2008 levels”. within the report, he noted that growth in rising regions, particularly in BRIC countries Brazil, Russia, India and China, is about to create up for continued weakness in Japan and Western Europe, compared to pre-downturn levels.

Spending in storage can boost this year’s datacenter hardware purchases. Hardcastle explained that whereas spending on storage represented solely 1 / 4 of total hardware expenditure for knowledge centers, virtually 1/2 the expansion in spending are from the storage market.

According to Hardcastle, ancient on-premise knowledge centers are underneath attack from “three sides”. “Firstly, virtualization technologies are serving to corporations to utilize their infrastructure a lot of effectively, inhibiting overall system growth,” he said.

“Secondly, knowledge centers are becoming a lot of economical, resulting in higher system deployment densities and inhibiting demand for floor area,” he added. “Thirdly, the move to consolidated third-party knowledge centers is reducing the variety of midsize knowledge centers.”

While midsize knowledge centers can face the crunch, Hardcastle noted that the most important knowledge center category can have the benefit of the increase of cloud computing.

Gartner reported that enormous knowledge centers, outlined as those with quite five hundred racks of kit, are set to extend spending–accounting for twenty six p.c of total expenditure in 2015, from twenty p.c in 2010. Spending by such giant facilities are driven by the cloud and also the shift from internal datacenter provision to external, it said.