A more nuanced understanding of cloud economics has prompted many organizations to pursue a hybrid infrastructure strategy through “fit-for-purpose” analyses.

The top 35 cloud and colocation service providers opened 10 million square feet of data center capacity in 2H20 according to Omdia’s latest Cloud & Colocation Data Center Building Tracker, despite lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Approximately 51% of the new capacity was brought online by colocation service providers and 48% by cloud service providers.

Continual high volumes of data creation have led to increased data center investments, boosting the need for power and cooling solutions that are environmentally friendly, highly efficient, and reduce the overall cost of ownership. The total investment in DCIS is expected to reach $26.15 billion by 2025 from $16.73 billion in 2019, up at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.7%.

End-user spending on global data center infrastructure is projected to reach $200 billion in 2021, an increase of 6% from 2020, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc. Despite a 10.3% decline in data center spending in 2020 due to restricted cash flow during the pandemic, the data center market is still expected to grow through 2024.

Vendor revenue from sales of IT infrastructure products (server, enterprise storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud environments, including public and private cloud, increased 2.2% in the first quarter of 2020 (1Q20) while investments in traditional, non-cloud, infrastructure plunged 16.3% year over year (YoY) according to the International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker.

The global market for racks in 2018 generated annual growth 3.4 percent to reach $1.5 billion in size, while the rack power distribution unit (rPDU) segment expanded by 8.9 percent to total $1.0 billion.

Service providers are investing in their data centers (DCs) to improve scalability, deploy applications rapidly, enable automation, and harden security, according to the Data Center Strategies and Leadership Global Service Provider Survey from IHS Markit.

In 2018, 85 percent of operator respondents plan to create, or will have already deployed, smart central offices, according to a new operator survey by IHS Markit.  Specifically, operators will be installing servers, storage and switching to create mini data centers in selected central offices.