Data Centre Growth Trends Sample Clauses

Data Centre Growth Trends. Several global trends fuel increasing demand in advanced ICT services. Over the past decade more and more individuals, businesses, and organizations have come to rely on ICT services to perform their day-to-day tasks, store their vital data, and govern their processes. Some of the recent global trends are: MOBILE – the explosion in the amount of mobile interconnected devices; BIG DATA – accumulation of huge amounts of information that can be beneficially analysed and transformed to knowledge and other assets; SOCIAL – interconnection of individuals and groups for leisure, commerce, and business, sharing the information, knowledge, and processes. These trends have created a new type of ICT consumers, not knowledgeable or even interested in infrastructural aspects of the services they consume. What users care about are ICT services, their ubiquitous availability, privacy and security, and global reach. In addition, there remain traditional consumers of ICT – scientific computations, commercial and business workflows, regulated information systems, etc. These sectors have been traditionally deploying and maintaining their own ICT infrastructure and were concerned with the technology they consume as well as with the cost, performance, and maintainability of the infrastructure they own or hire. ICT solutions providers industry that first appeared to cater to the needs of the traditional ICT infrastructure outsourcing, have grown significantly to accommodate the demand created by the MOBILE, SOCIAL, and BIG DATA trends. Today’s largest industry players, e.g. Amazon [21], IBM [22], Google [16], Microsoft [23], CISCO [20], etc., build scale-out DCs and compete in a growing and demanding market for providing ICT infrastructure and/or services. To be successful, it is mandatory to drive down the costs and drive up the efficiency and profitability. Resource consolidation and usage optimization are key to meeting these needs, turning the ICT provider business facilities, Data Centres, into heavy-duty industrial-scale factory-style instalments. Governments and regulatory requirements apply to limit the environmental impact of the DCs, further driving the trend of constructing green-field DCs in suitable geographical areas where, for example, cooling costs can be saved by leveraging the natural resources without harming the environment. Construction and equipment costs of these endeavours are huge making it more beneficial to create larger instalments and leverage econo...