5 fun data center facts from the Uptime Institute
July 11, 2012
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.
It’s a tough economy out there. That’s why some figures from the new Uptime Institute’s 2012 Data Center Industry Survey might surprise those who would expect spending on data center infrastructure to be cut to the bone. That’s not true for the majority of the 1,100 owners and operators that responded to the second annual survey. Here are my top five fun facts from the new survey.
1. Public cloud is big, private cloud is bigger. This year, 25 percent of respondents said they’re adopting public cloud, up from 16 percent last year. And 49 percent are deploying private clouds, up from 35 percent last year…
2. Data center budgets are on the rise. More than half (55 percent) of organizations responding said their budgets increased in 2012 over last year, compared to 52 percent who said that last year. And 32 percent said their data center budgets will rise more than 10 percent in 2012.
3. Asia is hot, hot, hot for data centers. An impressive 55 percent of Asian companies responding said their budgets are up more than 10 percent this year.
4. Data centers are running out of headroom. Nearly one third (30 percent) of those responding said their companies will run out of capacity in at least one of their sites this calendar year. Among the Asian respondents, a whopping 86 percent said they’d built a site “recently” but 35 percent said they are running into capacity constraints in their existing sites.
5. Energy efficiency is key, kinda. More than half of this year’s respondents cited saving energy as a major priority but most of those do not put financial incentives in place to achieve that goal. It was unclear from the report if those numbers are up, down or sideways from last year. Reported Power Usage Effectiveness ratings (PUE is the common measure of data center energy efficiency) stayed about the same — between 1.8 to 1.9 — year over year. A quarter of respondents said they collect carbon emissions data and 34 percent do the same for water usage.