Growth opportunities exist for modular market

Asia-Pacific to lead market growth until 2020, finds Frost & Sullivan’s Energy & Environment team.

Wednesday, 18th January 2017 Posted 7 years ago in by Phil Alsop

The mature global data center infrastructure solutions market will grow at a moderate pace despite data center consolidation, high capital expenditure, and end-user skepticism toward new or unfamiliar solutions. Increasing demand for data storage, security and speed is creating an unprecedented growth in data traffic, ultimately driving data center infrastructure growth. Modular solutions, in particular, will encourage capacity expansion and ensure seamless integration with existing data center infrastructure.

“While North America accounts for the highest revenues, emerging markets will grow at a faster rate, and China will lead the Asia-Pacific region,” said Energy Research Analyst Gautham Gnanajothi. “Edge computing and disaster recovery applications offer tremendous potential, indicating a shift toward bringing data centers closer to end users. This, too, will drive modularity in data centers in the Asia-Pacific region.”

Global Data Center Infrastructure Solutions Market is the new analysis from Frost & Sullivan’s Energy Storage Growth Partnership Service program. It highlights the growth opportunities and trends in the data center infrastructure solutions arena and provides a five-year forecast on the market metrics, covering data center cooling, genset, uninterruptible power supply (UPS), and rack segments. Cooling products accounted for a majority of the total market revenues in 2015-16 and remain the fastest growing segment, followed by rack and rack options.

“High user focus on traditional technologies and their tendency to underestimate the potential of modular solutions pose a severe challenge for the vendors,” noted Gnanajothi. “Further, the user base is contracting as data center owners turn to site consolidation to get the best value from IT investments; reducing the number of physical data center locations means fewer management issues and higher cost savings in terms of cooling and power needs.”

In addition to stepping up efforts to educate users on product innovations and technology advancements, market participants will increasingly form partnerships and alliances with other participants in the data center ecosystem to increase market reach. For instance, while rack manufacturers are collaborating with power distribution unit (PDU) manufacturers, UPS and cooling participants are forming alliances with modular data center providers.