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Thoughts on ways to improve the management of professional services firms

Thursday, March 01, 2012

Cloud computing, consolidation and the carbon tax cull Australian data centres

My posting continues to be irregular. I have lots to say, but am struggling to find the time away from my professional activities.

My last post was Problems with cloud computing - and paperless offices. Following on from this, I was interested in a story in IT Wire on Australian data centres. 

According to Gartner the number of Australian data centres will peak this year just shy of 50,000. That's a huge number. However, by 2015 the number of Australian data centres is forecast to drop to around 45,500.

According to Gartner's Phil Sargeant, there was a great deal of consolidation going on in the Australian market, and that more and more companies were looking to satisfy their ICT needs through a move to cloud computing.  The impost of the carbon tax would also have an impact.

Most Australian data centres are relatively small by global standards.

“You get economies of scale in the big data centres and they can bring that to bear re their ability to purchase energy,” Mr Sargeant said. “They have better energy characteristics than smaller data centres.”

The energy issue is important, for the data centres chew power.