The Australian outsourced data centre market will peak in 2015 as the rate of data centre capacity entering the market slows down and customers migrate their co-location services to the cloud according to a new Frost Sullivan report.
Last year, data centre services revenue in Australia totalled $826 million, a growth of 18.3 per cent from 2013.
Co-location services accounted for approximately 69 per cent of the market.
Data centre services revenue for 2015 is predicted to grow by 18.2 per cent.
However, Frost Sullivan Australia and New Zealand ICT practice senior research manager Phil Harpur said that managed hosting will experience stronger growth than co-location over this period, as demand decreases due to companies migrating from co-location to cloud services.
“Cloud providers, especially larger providers such as AWS, Microsoft and IBM SoftLayer are driving strong growth in the market and rapidly expanding their cloud capacity, whilst the government sector continues to increase its use of third-party hosted data centres,” he said.
“Demand is also growing for disaster recovery and business continuity services. Connected, multi-tenanted data centres are best placed to provide these services. Most third-party data centre providers in Australia have multiple data centres in multiple locations.”
According to Harpur, the average power density requirement of data centres is now up to 40KW to 50KW per rack and continues to increase in line with the increasing demand for high-performance computing applications.
As rack densities decrease, physical data centre space needed declines. This trend impacts data centre providers offering co-location services on both a retail and wholesale level.
“Significant new data centre capacity has entered the market over the last few years causing lower than average occupancy rates, and placing downward pressure on data centre pricing. However, additional capacity is generally being absorbed quickly,” Harpur said.
Securing sites in CBD locations and gaining access to sufficient power is increasingly challenging and it is becoming increasingly difficult for data centre owners to plan for additional capacity, he said.
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