Greg Ness
on January 23, 2012 
For a fresh perspective on data center obsolescence check out The Coming Colocation Crunch by Nemertes Principal Analyst Ted Ritter writing for Data Center Knowledge this week (Jan 18, 2012):
“Nemertes Research predicts a shortage of colocation space in the U.S. beginning this year, growing to a $1.9 billion facilities gap by 2015.”
Colocation comes in all shapes and sizes, from leased racks and stacks and public cloud services to containers and modules as well as large and highly customized (yet leased) wholesale data centers and campuses. According to Gartner the low end population of individual racks and computer rooms is shrinking while the population of enterprise and large data centers is growing at a healthy pace.*
This makes sense. Enterprises are migrating to larger and newer data centers about as fast as their users are migrating to new network-connected devices and IT teams are migrating to newer software tools and applications and ever more powerful servers.
The public cloud is generating more IT service demands for environments consuming less than 300 kW (competing directly with the small computer room or rack) while creating a new generation of customers who will eventually migrate into wholesale space or their own construction as their power consumption passes 500 kW (when cloud can become less economical). So we see growth in larger data centers and shrinkage in the traditional, less efficient rooms, etc.
More reading:
2011: The Year Data Centers Turned Green | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
* Forecast: Data Centers, Worldwide, 2010-20157 Oct 2011 | ID: G00221544 By Jonathon Hardcastle.
Check out Greg's articles here and at Archimedius.
Greg Ness is the vice president of marketing at Vantage Data Centers and has a blog called The Archimedius Report where he writes mainly about networking, security, and virtualization. 
