Datacenter space will grow to 1.94 billion square feet in 2018 from 1.58 billion square feet in 2013, said IT market research agency IDC.
However, the total number of datacenters is set to decline slowly from 2017. Before the beginning of the slow decline, the number of datacenters will reach 8.6 million in 2017.
There are two main reasons for the dip in the number. A decline in internal datacenter server rooms starting in 2016 and internal server closets starting in 2017 are the main two factors. IDC said other datacenter categories will grow throughout the forecast period, with the number of service provider datacenters increasing much faster.
IDC also said a majority of organizations will stop managing their own infrastructure over the next five years.
“They will make greater use of on-premise and hosted managed services for their existing IT assets, and turn to dedicated and shared cloud offerings in service provider datacenters for new services,” said Richard L Villars, vice president, Datacenter and Cloud Research at IDC.
“This will result in the consolidation and retirement of some existing internal datacenters – mainly at the low end. At the same time, service providers will continue their race to build, remodel, and acquire datacenters to meet the growing demand for capacity,” Villars added.
IDC noted that mega service provider datacenters will account for 72.6 percent of service provider datacenter construction in terms of space in 2018, while accounting for 44.6 percent of all new high-end datacenter space against 19.3 percent in 2013.
The number of internal high-end datacenter environments will continue to grow thanks to strong datacenter construction in China and construction of large datacenters to replace smaller, more dispersed enterprise datacenters.
Internal datacenter space will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.4 percent and account for nearly one third of total worldwide datacenter space (all types) in 2018, said IDC in a statement.
