The on-premise, enterprise data center market is flourishing, according to the newly released Data Center Strategies and Leadership North American Enterprise Survey from IHS Markit.
“Application architectures are evolving with the increased adoption of software containers and micro-services coupled with a Dev/Ops culture of rapid and frequent software builds. In addition, we see new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) incorporated into applications. These applications consume network bandwidth in a very dynamic and unpredictable manner and make new demands on servers for increased parallel computation,” said Cliff Grossner Ph.D., senior research director and advisor for cloud and data center at IHS Markit.
Some highlights of the report:
- Respondents expect a greater than 2x increase in the average number of physical servers in their DCs by 2019.
- Top DC investment drivers are security and application performance (75% of respondents) and scalability (71%).
- 9% of servers are expected to be 1-socket by 2019, up from 3% now.
- 73% of servers are expected to be running hypervisors or containers by 2019, up from 70% now.
- Top DC fabric features are high speed (68% of respondents), automated VM movement (62%), and support for network virtualization protocols (62%).
- 53% of respondents intend to increase investment in software-defined storage, 52% in NAS, and 42% in SSD.
- 30% of respondents indicated they are running general purpose IT applications, 22% are running productivity applications such as Microsoft Office, and 18% are running collaboration tools such as email, SharePoint, and unified communications in their data centers.
- Cisco, Dell, HPE, Juniper, and Huawei were identified as the top 5 DC Ethernet switch vendors by respondents ranking the top 3 vendors in each of 8 selection criteria.