The combination of higher energy prices, increased demand for computing capacity, environmental and economic pressure has made the development of energy-efficient data centers key to transforming the IT industry. According to a recent report from Pike Research, the global market for green data centers will grow from $17.1 billion in 2012 to $45.4 billion by 2016. The compound annual rate of growth is almost 28%.
In the report “Green Data Centers” Pike Research experts examine global trends in the field and combine the results with regional forecasts of market size and its possible extension to 2016. The report analyzes the effects of the global economic and political factors on the dynamics of regional market data centers and the emerging trends in the power and cooling infrastructure, server, storage and network technologies, software and control systems, which are the basis of the green data center.
At the present time there is not a single technology or a design scheme, which is able to make the data center completely environmentally friendly, says research director at Pike Research, Eric Woods. In fact, we are seeing the formation stage construction of green data centers technology, which involves a number of reforms in this area – technical innovation, operational improvements, and new design principles, changes in the relationship between the IT industry and business, as well as changes in energy supply chain for the data center.
In the report, the research firm revealed the consumption of data centers, which currently absorb the 1.5% of world energy production with the consequent difficulties of companies to manage demand as the industry will see increasing frequency of mobile devices, cloud computing and virtual elements. Added to this is the growing need and already greater storage space, which is followed by the rising price of real estate and energy that will lead to even a growing demand for storage space.
In particular, Woods sees two powerful trends in the IT industry that shape the evolution of the data center: virtualization and cloud computing.
Virtualization – an innovative technology that has the greatest influence on the shape of the modern data center. It is also one of the most effective steps to improve the energy efficiency of data centers. However, virtualization cannot reduce energy consumption. To get the most out of virtualization, other components of the data center infrastructure must be optimized to support more dynamic and have a higher density computing environments.
Cloud computing, in turn, has many advantages in efficiency. But for an adequate assessment of their impact on the environment requires new performance and new levels of transparency, the report said.
Experts considered all the latest advances in power and cooling infrastructure, design, server, storage, data, and software tools for data center infrastructure managements. The researchers examined the results of the key players in the industry, and they use strategies analyzed in the introduction and promotion of new technologies.
Pike Research indicates that the solutions to power and cooling infrastructure will be the largest market share of green technology and over 46% of revenue in the next five years. Energy efficient IT equipment will be the second-largest share with 41% of the market. The rest will come from the sales of monitoring and management solutions.
