Tag: datacentres

Hyperscale Datacentre Market will grow by 24.25 percent

Posted on November 15, 2019 by - News

ResearchAndMarkets.com has added up some numbers and divided by them by its shoe size and reached the conclusion that the hyperscale data centre market will grow at a CAGR of 24.25 percent over the next five years.

In its report, with the riveting title “The “Hyperscale Datacenter Market – Growth, Trends, Forecast (2019-2024),” the outfit defined hyperscale datacentres as a facility owned by the companies to offer cloud spaces for cloud computing and big data storage. It has at least 500 storage cabinets covering 10,000 Sq. Ft of space and has over 5,000 servers connected with an ultra-high-speed fibre network and offers with infrastructural cost to the end-user.

Data centres are an albatross

Posted on May 4, 2017 by - News

General_FOLDER_16 July_Albatross (RL_30June2015)This week Verizon and CenturyLink have been off-loading their data centre investments suggesting that the days of everyone+dog wanting a data centre business are past.

IT and telco providers are concluding that owning datacentres is too much of an effort and are off-loading them as soon as they can find a buyer.

Verizon this week flogged 29 datacentres to Equinix for $3.6 billion in a deal involving the transfer of 250 staff.

CenturyLink closed the sale of its data centre and colocation business, which has 700 staff, to a consortium of private equity investors.

In all cases the moves have been to release capital into their businesses. The companies feel it is better to invest in things like networks, instead of trying to support datacentres – particularly when there might be companies out there better suited to it.

UK-based resellers and hosting players are also having to re-assess their data centre strategies.

With more use of the cloud happening, even companies that own their own data centres are having to become increasingly technology-agnostic and data centre owning companies are having to change their operations.

How to shrink your datacentre

Posted on October 8, 2015 by - News

datacenterBy 2018 each person will transmit one gigabyte of data every day, said Jason Dodier, director of sales at APC Schneider Electric. By 2018 there will be 8.6 zettabytes of data. There are two billion internet users, 21 billion network devices, 1.3 million video views per minute.

The data network worldwide use the industrial internet of things, the internet of things itself and social and internet data sources.

Speaking at the Canalys Channel Forum, in Barcelona, the company set out its pitch to the resellers and distributors in the audience. So, APC has something it calls a micro data centre but he said many customers wanted less latency than 100ms, so his company is using edge, which provides less than 10ms latency.

Edge technology is required for medical applications, machine to machine, smart cities, artificial intelligence, 3D printing and speech/image recognition.

Edge computing architectures include gateway, 1 to 10 racks or micro data centres, and regional data centres.

He said localised data centres will be an important part of the market – it;s fast to deploy and provides low latency and high bandwidth.

Schneider APC customers include banks, automotive, oil and gas, government and military and colocation banks.

Micro data centres include storage, processing and networking, ships in a single enclosure and includes power, cooling, security and management tools.

A micro datacentre costs $5/watt for a one rack system compared to $10.8/watt for a 1MW tier one data centre.

Schneider APC sells through a large partner network. Customers can self install, or use system integrator install.

Notebook ODMs fleeing to the cloud

Posted on August 3, 2015 by - News

cloudbustThere could be a drastic cut back in the number of notebooks on the market.

Word in from the Far East is that  notebook ODMs, such as Quanta and Compal, have been expanding staff specifically for servers used in cloud computing data centres, their component suppliers, including thermal modules, power supplies and metal stamping, have also extended related production.

It seems likely that the manufacturers have had a gutsful of making PCs that no one wants and are seeing the future as being cloudy.

Intel’s datacentre business units had 10% growth in second-quarter revenues, while profits from the business also surpassed those of its PC business, making the datacentre centre business the CPU giant’s new main profit contributor. The trend also triggered upstream supply chains to start turning their focuses to the segment.

Choung Technology said that more than 40 per cent  of its revenues contributed by server-related products. CCI ships about eight million thermal modules for servers each year, and is supplying to clients including HP, Dell, and Quanta.

Furukawa Electric also stuck its foot in the door supplying Google and Microsoft to supply products for their datacentres. The company also started sending samples to Facebook and Amazon recently, looking to expand into their supply chains.

Quanta’s server team has about 1,000 employees and is focusing mainly on the integration between software and hardware. By the end of 2015, Quanta is looking to double the team’s personnel and will continue to recruit more talent in 2016.

Flash worth $2.9 billion last year

Posted on January 29, 2015 by - News

storageFlash storage hauled in revenues of close to $3 billion last year in the European region.
IDC said that even though it’s a relatively new tech, its adoption is “soaring@.
Total capacity of flash based arrays reached 3.53 exabytes last year, and the market itself grew year on year by 32 percent.
Flash array systems is growing in data centres but there’s still a high dollar per gigabyte price to pay, compared to conventional hard drives.
Western Europe accounted for 75 percent of revenues in 2014 with UK, Germany and France leading the pack.
IDC predicts that the flash storage market will grow at 15 percent CAGR right through until 2018. Conventional hard drives will still have a place in the enterprise, but largely as back up media.

 

MEMS market galvanised by the internet of things

Posted on December 19, 2014 by - News

Internet of ThingsGrowth in the internet of things (IoT) means demand for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) has risen steeply this year.

The MEMS category of semiconductors includes accelerometers, pressure sensors, timing components and microphones.

MEMS are used in areas like asset tracking, smart grids, building and other sectors.  Market research company IHS said that revenues last year were $16 million but will be worth $120 million yearly by 2019.

But MEMS will also be widely used in datacentres and this means that this sector of the market will be worth $214 million in 2018.

By 2025, shipments of MEMS for industrial IoT equipment will amount to 7.3 billion units. Last year 1.8 billion units shipped.

Datacentres will want optical MEMS, used for wavelength selective switches and optical cross connects.

Storage revenues continue to grow

Posted on December 8, 2014 by - News

storageThe generation of vast amounts of data continues to fuel the disk storage systems revenue in the third quarter.

With revenues of $8.8 billion, up 5.1 percent from the same period last year, 25 exabytes shipped in the quarter, said IDC.  Capacity shipments soared by 42 percent during the quarter, compared to Q3 2013.

IDC said sub $100K external array revenues grew by over six percent during the quarter, but shipments ODMs (original design manufacturers) directly to hyperscale datacentres showed positive growth.

EMC remains at the top spot for the quarter, followed by HP, Dell, IBM and Netapp.

ODM direct sales accounted for 24 percent of the market however, outstripping the traditional vendors.  And this trend is continuing, as we’ve reported previously, with ODMs also shipping more and more servers directly and bypassing the brand names,

Virtual clients break the $1 billion barrier

Posted on November 12, 2014 by - News

dollarBy 2016 the virtual client computing (VCC) market will be worth $1 billion in 2016, up from $805 million in 2013, in Europe.

So says IDC, which says that growth is fuelled by the centralised virtual desktop (CVD), also known as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

The growth is due to advances in datacentre infrastructure virtualisation.  Cloud service providers are going to take a far larger part oof the VDI market and that brings the benefits of client and desktop virtualisation to small enterprises.

But while Western Europe is likely to see bigger growth in VDI projects, central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa are lagging behind.

Mohamed Hefy, senior research analyst at IDC said: “There are more urgent infrastructure challenges [there] – for example hospital funds would be directed to critically needed medical equipment and analytics capabilities rather than virtualised infrastructure.”

The trend toward bring your own device (BYOD) technology and increasing workforce mobility will be factors considered by IT staff evaluating VDI.

Datacentre automation market worth billions

Posted on October 31, 2014 by - News

server-racksA report by Markets and Markets estimated that by 2019 the datacentre automation market will be worth $7.53 billion.

The report said that demand for fast data access and storage continues to rise and that’s creating more and more datacentres.  Datacentre automation is sometimes known as Software Defined Data Centres (SDDCs).  Automation helps management deal with scalability, flexibility, manageability and reduced costs.

The market research company said it segments the datacentre automation market by hardware such as network automation, server automation and storage automation.  It also values the secor by service including consulting services, installation and support.

The demand for data is forcing businesses to either build new datacentres or upgrade existing sites.

And the cost of datacentre infrastructure continues to increase at the same time as IT budgets continues to decrease.

Majr vendors in the industry include HP, Oracle, Dell, Brocade, Cisco, IBM, CA and BMC Software.

Amazon invests in German datacentres

Posted on October 23, 2014 by - News

amazonsMany people might think that Amazon is where you buy your books, your Hue lights and your CDs but behind the scenes it is  becoming a major player in the datacentre business.

And now, according to the Financial Times, Amazon will build several datacentres in Frankfurt in a bid to allay customers’ fears that their data is housed in places where security and privacy are not as high a priority as in Germany.

The FT reports that the EU has much stricter data protection laws than other territories.  And, of the EU countries, Germany has the best privacy control.

A senior VP of Amazon Web Services told the FT that many of its German customers would prefer to have their data held locally. Although a figure hasn’t been placed on the German infrastructure investment, it’s believed that such a project will require a multimillion dollar investment.

US providers like Google, Rackspace and others compete with Amazon but are based in the USA.  Amazon is believed to generate revenues from its cloud business amounting to over $5 billion during 2014.

Move your datacentres to Scandinavia!

Posted on October 23, 2014 by - News

datacenterWhile many multinational and pan-European businesses have their co-location centres in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London or Paris, IT managers should think about moving their datacentres to Norway or Sweden.

That’s according to analysts at the Gartner Group and there’s a number of reasons why Sweden and Norway are attractive.

Tiny Haynes, a research director at Gartner, said that power costs in Norway and Sweden have fallen by five percent since 2010. That contrasts with the EU average power costs that have risen 13 percent in the same period.

Also it’s cold in Norway and Sweden and that can give datacentres efficiencies by using outside air cooling.

Gartner believes that managers can save up to 50 percent by moving their infrastructure lock, stock and barrel.

Haynes said: “It’s likely that most organisations will find some workloads that can be moved to a lower cost location without impacting performance.”

Datacentres get cold corridors

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

corridorDutch company Minkels said it has started selling the free standing Cold Corridor.

What’s a Cold Corridor?  Minkels said that unlike the normal for the datacentre market, it lets you create isolated corridors without datacentre racks.

The reason for this it is modular and allows the optimisation of air flow, fire safety, and access security.

Minkels said that these days storage is often delivered as complete rack systems in different sizes.  But using its Cold Corridor lets datacentre managers fit other styles and sizes of racks later, meaning that it gives greater flexibility for future needs.

Minkels claims that using this product is much simpler and more cost efficient than customised projects. It’s a way of upgrading existing datacentres.

Minkels, a subsidiary of Legrand is a supplier of modular datacentre products and boasts large corporations as its clients.

Notebook players change their focus

Posted on October 10, 2014 by - News

server-racksA few weeks back we reported that the lucrative datacentre market could well be the target for new vendors to enter the fray.

Now there’s some hard evidence for that. Taiwanese firm Quanta Computer, which previously played in the original design manufacturer (ODM) game, and made notebooks for the major brands, has branched out into the server market.

Digitimes reports that Quanta has completely re-invented itself and is positioning itself to sell into the European datacentre market.

It is offering servers and services to European datacentres and has hired a sales team specifically for the territory.

It faces stiff competition from the likes of HP and Dell. But the advantage it has is that it has its own manufacturing and further has played the very slim margin game when it made notebooks for multinational brands like HP and Dell.

The move is likely to be good value for the datacentre buyers because there’s no doubt such moves will prompt something of a price war in the sector.

HP intros ARM into datacentres

Posted on September 29, 2014 by - News

HPIn a sign that things wont be what they were in the past, HP said it has announced two servers based on ARM architecture, rather than the old fashioned Intel stuff.

The two enterprise class servers use 64-bit ARM microprocessors which it said “offer value choice in their compute strategy”.  Translated out of marketing speak, this means ARM based chips are much cheaper than Intel X86 chips.

HP is also offering a production platform letting software developers create, test and port applications to the ARM server.

The servers belong to HP’s Proliant Moonshot family –  the company claims that they will let companies scale to any workload, and are specifically aimed at datacentres.

The HP Proliant m400 server is part of a strategy the company has developed over some years to fit high engineering standards.

“ARM technology will change the dynamics of how enterprises build IT solutions to quickly address customer challenges,” said Antonio Neri, senior vice president and general manager, Servers and Networking, HP. “HP’s history, culture of innovation and proven leadership in server technology position us as the most qualified player to empower customers with greater choice in the server marketplace.”

The servers will support Ubuntu, Metal as a Service (MAAS) software preinstalled, and also offers IBM Informix.

HP customers already include Sandia National Labs, the University of Utah and Paypal.  The servers are available today.

Big Data will bring bonanza

Posted on December 18, 2013 by - News

clouds3The market for Big Data tech and services is expected to be worth $32.4 billion by 2017, growing between then and now at a CAGR of 27 percent.

That’s what market research company IDC is projecting, in a report that says that growth is about six times the growth rate of the ICT market.

Dan Vesset, a VP at IDC, said that the Big Data market is growing fast as startups and large IT company attempt to take market share and fold in customers.

Cloud infrastructure has the highest CAGR in individual segments, at 49 percent until 2017.  And automation based on Big Data tech is set to affect knowledge worker roles.

And datacentres are likely to suffer too, because it will either be discarded or archived to the cloud, meaning the storage market will be affected.