DatacenterDynamics by Country

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You only have to be in London for a day to realize just how dense the city is. You can cross most of it in a few hours. There may be little room to grow out, but London has grown up new skyscrapers line the sky in most directions. Commercial real estate across the UK is in demand thanks to growing business needs, and the growing density of the data center is behind some of this drive. This was one of the key findings from the DatacenterDynamics GlobalIndustry Census.
 

In the most comprehensive industry survey yet, the sample offered a profile similar to that seen with other developed nations and identifies the UK — centered on London — as a truly global data center market, with global reach and influence (for more on this see our box on how our UK sample measured up below).

The UK takes to outsourcing
London was always well ahead in data center development, but when it came to outsourcing it has historically fallen behind. This year, however, our results showed that about 105,000 racks were outsourced by our sample, costing close to US$600m — a figure projected to grow by US$148m in 2012.

“This is enormous growth. The UK has largely depended on the financial sector, which has historically seen outsourcing as a disadvantage,” DatacenterDynamics research director Nick Parfitt says.

“These figures, however, indicate that the UK is now catching up with the other markets in the adoption of outsourcing.” The recession is partly behind this. It has driven manycompanies to go back to grassroots-thinking within the business and to outsource datacenter operations.

The real differentiators
Overall, our UK respondents said they spent US$1,050m on IT optimization last year, and they expect this figure to grow by US$130m in 2012 across their data center operations. A majority of UK respondents also said they continuously monitored most aspects of the data center, and about 40% said they planned on investing in measuring and monitoring tools, while 30% said they planned on spending on systems in the next 12 monthsacross their portfolio.

Parfitt says this is largely because of the increasing legislative environment that surrounds data center operations in the UK — from the EU Code of Conduct to the Carbon Reduction Commitment. “The UK and China like measuring urban emissions morethan anywhere else. For China, it is mostly because they like the latest in technology. For the UK, it is very much about legislation,” Parfitt says.

Other technologies that UK data centeroperators are looking to invest in include blade servers (37%), server virtualization (35%) andcloud architectures (39%).