Is the enterprise data center disappearing?

With the rise of cloud computing, companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft have built giant data centers that the world has never seen before. These tech giants have customized many facilities, including revolutionary cooling configurations, vast computing resources, and the ability to store countless data. To make it more environmentally friendly, they have increased their sources of wind, solar and battery power. In short, they have taken the technical level to a whole new level.

This, in turn, has led many organizations to make more use of resources. Over time, they become less dependent on their internal data centers. In some cases, companies have ended the practice of owning and operating their own data centers.
 

Is IT a utility?

Some wonder if we will eventually see the end of the internal data center. Will the IT landscape evolve into a fully functional model, just as it does with telephones, water, gas, and electricity - a small number of computing resource utilities serving the entire public?

That seems to have been the case over the past few years. The number of data centers has decreased. But the latest data center status reports from AFCOM and DataCenter World suggest that the end of the data center may be a long way off. The report highlights the fact that construction of new data centers and the upgrading of existing data centers have stagnated for the second year in a row.

The current game name seems to maximize the density, efficiency, and return on investment of existing space. As a result, data center managers are cramming more data into devices they already have.

Based on the original findings ：

* Sixty-two percent of respondents identified space needs for the next three years.
* Forty-eight percent plan to build or expand their existing data centers within 12 to 36 months.
* Ninety-nine percent plan to deploy at least one new data center, and another 19 percent plan to add two or more.
* Five per cent said they would build five or five new sites in the next 36 months.

Colo and Hyperscale extensions

Bill Kleyman, the report's author and executive vice president of switch digital solutions, points out that those building or expanding data centers are primarily hosting providers and hypersized/multi-tenant providers.

"The number of enterprise data centers continues to decline slowly as leaders in this area focus on the core competencies of the business," he said. "The way we design and build data centers is changing: a broader focus on performance, density, and efficiency."

Sixty-two percent of respondents said rack density has increased over the past three years. Twenty-five per cent of rack densities are between 7kw and 10kW - not so long ago, 3kw was considered relatively dense.

The enterprise data center is not dead yet

All in all, enterprise data centers are far from dead. Those who now own them are less likely to give them up any time soon. They had invested millions of dollars, and in most cases it would be irresponsible to throw it out the window.

But with the exception of the big data providers and the biggest companies, don't expect to hear a lot of announcements about new enterprise data centers. Instead, organizations are more likely to continue to increase density, keeping some workloads internal and sending other workloads to the cloud. The current business model of the electricity market will take a long time to achieve, i.e. to have some computing tools available to the general public.