Data centre equipment in Australia is a $2.5 billion a year business, but it ain’t the business it once was. Growing demand for cloud rather than building your own data centre means that we’re seeing a decline in building activity, especially for larger centres.
Gartner sums up the situation in its annual roundup of data centre expenditure:
Despite this spending increase, the number of data centres in Australia continues to decline as Australian businesses are focused on improving data centre economics, coupled with agility and management. Of the 62,314 data centres in Australia in 2015, only 11 are classified as large data centres, defined by Gartner as having at least 1,000 racks of equipment and/or at least 20,000 square feet, while 78 are enterprise data centres with at least 250 racks of equipment and/or at least 5,000 square feet. The vast majority are classed as single deployments or small racks in “computer rooms” in smaller companies.
One point to note there? Despite the widespread availability of cloud computing, there are still thousands of on-premises centres. We’re not entirely ready to go all-cloud just yet.
Comments
2 responses to “The Number Of Data Centres In Australia Is Shrinking”
As soon as you push your data off-site it’s often cheaper to go global cloud – the price is usually less and the automation of high availability means your data is always there when you need it.
A lot of people worry about the safety of cloud – mainly incursions by the US government. I went to TechEd a couple of years ago when they were first starting to really push their cloud offerings. Whenever people asked questions about the Patriot Act or similar, they weren’t really able to answer them well.
I’d also make the argument that with the amount of very decent virtualisation technologies that we have available we can squeeze more into one server rack than ever before which might equal less floor space usage?