by Shane Henson — September 26, 2012—The “greening” of data centers is becoming increasingly important for FMs and data center managers charged with reducing their companies’ energy usage and costs. According to a new report from Pike Research, Green Data Centers, a combination of rising energy costs, increasing demand for computing power, environmental concerns, and economic pressure has made the green data center a focal point for the transformation of the information technology (IT) industry as a whole. In fact, the worldwide market for green data centers will grow from $17.1 billion in 2012 to $45.4 billion by 2016—at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 28%, says Pike Research.
The report explores global green data center trends with regional forecasts for market size and opportunities through 2016. It also examines the impacts of global economic and political factors on regional data center growth, along with newly adopted developments in power and cooling infrastructure, servers, storage, and data center infrastructure management software tools across the industry. The research study profiles key industry players and their strategies for expansion and technology adoption.
As the report notes, in particular, two powerful trends in IT are shaping the evolution of data centers, virtualization and cloud computing. Virtualization, the innovation with the greatest impact on the shape of the modern data center, is also recognized as one of the most effective steps toward improving power efficiency in the data center. In itself, however, virtualization may not lead to reduced energy costs. To gain the maximum benefits from virtualization, other components of the data center infrastructure will need to be optimized to support more dynamic and higher-density computing environments. Cloud computing, meanwhile, has many efficiency advantages, but new metrics and new levels of transparency are required if its impact on the environment is to be adequately assessed, the report finds.
