Data centres increasingly seen as critical business priority 14 August, 2009 By Chris Talbot

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The "Global Data Center Survey," found that 32 per cent of all organizations surveyed worldwide are planning or building new data centres, while 83 per cent of existing data centres continue to receive investment for infrastructure and technology projects. Of the 730 IT professionals surveyed, 65 per cent said they were required to demonstrate a specific return on the investment before their data centre projects were approved.

"It is clear that data centres are viewed as mission-critical, and organizations continue to invest accordingly to ensure quality, performance and intelligence is successfully supporting business goals," said George Brooks, director of enterprise data centres at CommScope, in a statement. "Whether it is to stay ahead of technology developments and new applications or to address cost-efficiency opportunities, data centre expansions and improvement projects are continuing around the world, despite the economic downturn."

The survey also found that 54 per cent of the organizations installing new copper cabling would invest in Category 6A 10Gbps solutions because its high-performance and reliability are key for virtualization and consolidation, which are the main drivers of green and cost-reduction strategies and are highly dependent on reliability. Airports (86 per cent) and healthcare (71 per cent) are the business sectors leading the drive toward investment in Category 6A 10G copper solutions.

Of respondents installing new fibre cabling in their data centre, the shift to 10G and 40/100G laser optimized multi-mode fibres is accelerating with data centres installing OM3 at a rate of 31 per cent and installing OM4 at a rate of 19 per cent.

Investments are being made in power and space saving technologies for data centres, including blade servers that are more compact and energy efficient than previous types, and virtualization that allows more applications to run on each server.

With additional computing resources packed into equipment racks, data centres are moving to higher bandwidth solutions to reduce growth in cabling volume. Blade servers can decrease cable management complexity as compared to rack optimized servers, according to CommScope. Thirty per cent are already using new 10Gbps copper connectivity solutions in the network backbone and a further 46 per cent plan to do so in the next three years.

In horizontal network segments, 21 per cent are using 10Gbps over copper. Additionally, 48 per cent plan to upgrade in the next three years. The new, high performance copper cabling, conforming to the Category 6A/Class EA standards, offers an easy-to-install option for high performance datacenters, CommScope stated.

"The recession is not damping the demand for online information and applications that is driving data centre expansion," said Brooks. "At the same time, growth of image and video databases is increasing the requirement for higher bandwidth infrastructure within the data centre. As servers get smaller and support more applications, connection densities and bandwidth will have to grow dramatically."

According to CommScope, the survey shows that the importance of performance and quality in data centre infrastructure is widely appreciated. More respondents named performance (62 per cent) and ease of maintenance (54 per cent) as influences on their purchasing decisions than said they were influenced by price (50 per cent).

"Improved data centre performance is an efficiency driver that can help organizations fight the effects of the recession and be ready for the upturn," said Brooks. "Physical layer infrastructure is a focus of attention since it can quickly become a bottleneck at times of peak demand. Reliable, affordable 10G and 40/100G solutions will be important to the ongoing operational and space saving efficiencies of data centres for years to come. These high speed infrastructure connections free space for other equipment and for the flow of cooling air, which was an issue of concern for more respondents (61 per cent) than any other."