More than half of used data centre racks will be off-premises by 2024

The average enterprise data centre is nine times smaller than the average colocation facility

Over half of the world’s utilised racks will be located outside of the data centre by the end of 2024.

That’s according to the latest Infrastructure Market Monitor report from 451 Research, a New York-based enterprise IT analysis firm.

“We expect to see a decline in utilized racks across the enterprise, with a mid-single-digit CAGR increase in non-cloud colocation, and cloud and service providers expanding their utilized footprint over 13 percent,” Greg Zwakman, VP of Market and Competitive Intelligence at 451 Research explained.

An important caveat is that the research excludes racks utilised in server rooms, closets, micro data centres and telco hubs from its projection. Server rooms and closets currently account for nearly 95 percent of total data centres, but only 23 percent of total racks utilised.

451’s infrastructure report breaks down the total number of data centre sites worldwide, alongside their size, power and rack count.

While the analyst projects total worldwide data centre growth to decline at a 0.1 percent CAGR between now and 2024, it predicts overall space, power and rack capacity to increase as organisations shift to larger facilities. Nevertheless, the average enterprise data centre (again excluding server rooms et. al) is currently nine times smaller than the average colocation facility, as demand for strategically located low latency multi-tenant facilities continues its rise.

Naturally, the top hyperscalers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook) represent the largest chunk within the cloud and service providers segment. At present, the top six hyperscalers account for 42 percent of total cloud and service providers’ utilised racks in 2019. This is expected to expand at an 18 percent CAGR and reach 50.4 percent of the total by 2024.

While countless reports have long-projected the gradual decline of enterprise data centres, 451’s report is a useful reference point as is it considers a wide range of metrics.

For instance, the report investigated the impact of IoT on rack demand, projecting IoT workloads and storage to account for 15 percent of utilised data centre racks by the end of 2024.

“Our research leverages other 451 Research deliverables, such as the Datacenter KnowledgeBase [a detailed database of over 6,300 multi-tenant datacenters], Voice of the Enterprise end-user surveys, and other Market Monitor products,” said Leika Kawasaki, Research Manager.

“In doing so, we can expand our analysis around areas such as IoT’s impact on datacenter providers, cloud and service providers’ share of the datacenter market, and other derivative analysis,” he added.