Datacentres to shrink significantly, says Gartner

Datacentres are set to radically reduce in size over the next five years, according to research firm Gartner.

In a report entitled Shrinking Data Centers: Your Next Data Center Will Be Smaller Than You Think, David Cappuccio, managing vice president and chief of research for infrastructure at Gartner, argued that there were four key reasons for this.

Design: Datacentre design has begun to incorporate different density zones for different workload types. For example, it might deploy in-rack cooling or cold air for very high-density workloads designed not to affect the rest of the floor. Parts of the infrastructure dealing with differing workloads would have been separated in the past but can now be arranged alongside each other.

Green issues: Energy consumption in datacentres is under scrutiny as green IT has become a higher priority. Datacentres are now being developed with specific power utilisation efficiency targets in mind.

Conquering density: Gartner argues that currently many datacentres underuse their space and although physical floor space may be nearing capacity, the actual compute space within racks and servers is poorly used. Newer designs are being developed to make better use of racks, increasing the compute-per-square-foot ratio.

Cloud computing: Migrating non-critical workloads to a cloud provider frees up much-needed floor space, power and cooling within the datacentre. As the move to the cloud increases in popularity, the corporate datacentre will begin to look very different, with only core business functions – those that differentiate a business from its competition, or are truly mission-critical – remaining in the primary datacentre.