The demand for data center construction has increased rapidly, especially since the introduction of cloud computing and big data analytics. Technavio analysts expect the Global Data Center Construction Market to grow at a CAGR of 10.34 percent for the 2014-2019 period.
Many SMEs still house server rooms in their premises. However, over the years, because of the growth in business requirements coupled with advances in technology, advanced server rooms that were better equipped to deal with large data volumes came to be known as data centers. Many leading organizations started expanding the server rooms inside their office campuses into a separate monitored facility.
The number of data centers has increased steadily in the past decade; however, after virtualization came into the picture, it paved the way for the construction of smart data centers.
Even though virtualization reduced the need for more on-premise facilities to an extent, the power consumed by data centers is still high. The IT, electrical, and mechanical systems have also seen a marked increase in technological innovations.
The dynamic nature of the technological arena has meant that the hardware infrastructure housed in a data center is rapidly becoming obsolete, i.e., on a YOY basis. This stems from the increase in efforts directed at cost reduction and enhancement of energy efficiency.
How the Internet of Things (IoT) Influences Data Center Construction
The exponential growth in the IoT presents challenges in terms of capacity, analytics, and security. Therefore, the need for data centers equipped to deal with this has increased. It will be a challenging task to process the huge data volumes generated by devices connected to the internet, especially if the data are stored in a single location. The requirement for optimally sized data centers among enterprises to manage their capacity and real-time computing requirements has increased.
Therefore, the construction of large and small data centers in several locations to store the data generated by the IoT coupled with the initial screening of the data will help organizations in limiting storage-related issues. Construction of distribution and micro data centers will increase during the forecast period, driven by the increased need to manage the huge data volumes generated by the IoT.
