Study: More IT Dollars to Target Data Centers

Enterprises are planning to spend more on data center products and services in the coming year, according to an  analysis by VARBusiness based on its quarterly State of technology report, with much of that new investment focused on productivity gains possible through blade servers and server consolidation. Companies are "once again looking to innovation as a way to trim data-center size, lower power consumption and heat, gain utilization efficiencies and turn IT into more of a service," notes the article by Ed Scannell and Jeffrey Schwartz, and "vendors are climbing over one another to fill demand."

It's a comprehensive article, and includes lots of good news for data center service providers, who will have the opportunity to deepen relationships with existing customers implementing consolidation projects, and sell more services to new customers. But as always, there's a price tag on progress, in this case the cost of engineering energy and cooling soltuions to high-density computing and the "hot spots" it creates within the data center.

Since much of the projected spending is focused on the "data center footprint," there's food for thought for landlords as well. How will server consolidation impact overall demand for data center space? Will smaller footprints mean smaller lease requirements? Or will the additional customers moving equipment into data centers mean a net increase in demand for square footage? No final wisdom on this just yet, but the VARBUsiness article is a worthwhile read.