Data centers will keep spreading across the continent, yielding billions of EUR in revenues

Nov 13, 2009 14:06 GMT  ·  By

The economical worldwide crisis is said to have affected every aspect of life on the planet. Economy, culture, religion, commerce, everything had to suffer because of it. Everything except the data-center outsourcing, that is. Europe has seen a huge number of emerging data centers and the total revenue for 2010 is an estimated 3.3 billion EUR. Tariff Consultancy (the resource center for information, data, analyses, reports, studies, consultancy, researches, symposiums and events) examined the standard prices of 19-inch racks, small cage spaces and 50 KVA suites of space and found that, in no less than 19 European countries, the revenue would skyrocket. Specifically, with the way the market is going right now, the revenues will end up doubling and, in the case of equipment, even tripling by 2015.

Although the most costly data-center floor space is found in Denmark, Switzerland and Ireland (with monthly rates per rack of 1,050 EUR to 1,300 EUR), geographically speaking, the main data-center market is located in the UK (which holds 16 percent of the raised-floor space), followed by Germany (14 percent), France (ten percent), Spain (eight percent) and Italy and the Netherlands (both with six percent).

An estimate given by the forecast seemed to indicate that the European data-center outsourcing would increase so much during the following year, that the overall revenues would turn from 2010's 3.3bn EUR into an astounding 7.2bn EUR in 2015. This would imply an increase by an average of 14 percent a year in the area of raised-floor data-center capacity. This would accumulate, by 2015, into a full 92.5-percent increase.

This rate is only surpassed by the equipment revenues. Despite the features of server virtualisation and chiller-less data centers, they are believed to increase by 25% a year, leading to tripling the current revenues (and even a slight amount beyond that).

Not taking into account the electricity shortages that often plague data centers, the revenue per square meter of the raised-floor space will increase by five-eight percent per year, Tariff Consultancy says.