Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Equinix, Digital Realty, and Microsoft have been recognized as key players of the global data center market by the new “Global Data Center Market 2016-2020” report.
Other prominent vendors cited by the report are: 21Vianet Group, Alibaba, Apple, AT&T, Century Link, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, CSC, Facebook, Global, IBM, Level 3 Communication, NTT, PEER 1 Hosting, Rackspace, Singtel, Switch, Verizon, and Zayo.
Commenting on the report, an analyst from the research team said: “Implementation of SDDCs will be a key trend for market growth. SDDC has three components: SDN, SDS and software defined compute (SDC). Enterprises adopting cloud-based infrastructure consider the possibility of establishing an SDDC to achieve better control over business-critical operations and enhance the management of their data center facilities. Many enterprises worldwide implement SDDC. Vendors in the SDDC market, such as Cisco, Citrix, Dell, IBM, HP, EMC², Fujitsu, and VMware, are developing offerings to support the centralized management of data center infrastructure, including servers, networks, and storage.”
According to the report, one of the key drivers will be the increased use of big data analytics. Most business- and consumer-based applications generate large amounts of structured and unstructured data. They also use sensors that can generate massive amounts of data within a short time. The architecture for data generated by a single business application involves several sources. These collected data are of high volume, velocity, and variety. Big data analytics helps to understand this data and make business decisions based on them.
Further, the report states that high energy consumption will be a major challenge against the market growth. Data centers accounted for around 1.5% of the global electricity consumption. A data center equipment consumes high volumes of power for efficient functioning. So, enterprises find it difficult to handle the growing OPEX of these data center facilities. Developed countries, with a higher number of data centers, are challenged by the high electricity consumption compared with developing countries. The growing construction of data centers in developing countries raises the risk of power shortage in the future. Modern data centers install intelligent infrastructure systems like DCIM monitoring to supply power based on the requirement.