I thought this was quite an interesting read over the weekend, regarding global server shipment volumes, released last week by IDC:

http://bit.ly/1lZeI45

“Large datacenter build-outs by global cloud service providers and social networks accounted for a significant chunk of growth in Western Europe that is most notable in the Nordic region and leads to a greater rise in shipments than revenues due to large deals of commodity servers at low prices from Asian ODMs as well as major server vendors,” said Andreas Olah, research analyst, Enterprise Server Group, IDC EMEA. “However, several countries that saw larger shipments to mega-datacenter customers in the previous year experienced a decline this quarter including the Netherlands, Ireland, and Belgium.

My take on this is that it seems volume growth is towards very large users taking “commodity servers”  – also I’ve never heard of the term “mega-data centre customers” but quite like it – this must be the massive global users, guessing Facebook, Google and the like (thinking of them due to their own data centres in Sweden and Finland) for example.

With so much capacity and choice in the colocation market it is often easy to assume the growth in “big data” and content is going to be a massive demand driver – however, I think the interesting trend that this report from IDC highlights is that growth does seem to be there, according to these figures, but at the “commoditised” end of the market.  This has interesting implications for the colocation market, a theme we will investigate further in our 2014 industry research.  This certainly seems to fit in with our thinking that colocation “ecosystems” are becoming a relatively smaller and highly specialist part of the colocation market overall.

As a quick update on other matters:

  • I’ll be speaking on the Demo Stage LawTech Futures this week, I think the event is now sold out but details here:   http://bit.ly/1mmvFIA .  Do come and say hello if you’re there, we are on Stand2.
  • I’ve also just listed a 500kw offer in Global Switch 2 – 4kW racks available from £1000 per rack per month, including power.  Install fees apply, dual power.  5 year terms available.  Please contact me for further details.
  • Entries have now closed for the 7th Data Centre Europe Awards, and the shortlisted finalists will be announced at the Data Centres Europe event this year in Monaco, 27-29th May, more details at: http://bit.ly/1iTAdmI