Intelligent Data Centres Issue 39 | Page 21

INDUSTRY INTELLIGENCE POWERED BY THE DCA

The rise of the hyperscalers and how they ’ re setting benchmarks for future performance expectations

Steve Hone , CEO – The DCA , discusses the benefits of hyperscale data centres and how they are set to dominate data centre spending .

The number of hyperscale data centres currently stands at just over 700 worldwide – a figure which represents a doubling in both the number of hyperscale data centres and capacity in just five years . Interestingly , nearly half of that capacity can be found in the US , followed by China and EMEA .

The leading hyperscale companies remain Amazon , Microsoft , Google and Facebook ; however , in respect to speed of growth , it is China that is leading the charge , with an equivalent new data centre coming online every day during 2021 . This makes China the fastest growing data centre and hyperscale market on the planet , with organisations such as ByteDance , Alibaba and Tencent seeing the largest increase in capacity .
The global increase in hyperscale capacity is not only being driven by breaking new ground on new sites , but by also expanding the capacity of existing facilities , partnering with traditional colocation hosting providers in key locations , to increase speed of delivery and by investing in new storage and compute technology to ensure optimum performance and efficiency is achieved .
Surprisingly far from slowing things down , the COVID-19 crisis has only served to accelerate the pace of Digital Transformation globally . Projects which were supposed to take years to complete have been completed in months . Given the speed at which businesses operate today , it has become imperative for firms to create an IT infrastructure that can scale proportionately to provision increased demand and scale down appropriately when demand reduces . The pace of demand can fluctuate heavily as business dynamics change and most underlying IT infrastructures are simply unable to scale and keep up .
This has accelerated the demand for hyperscale data centres . Hyperscale refers to the capability of an IT system or architecture to scale exponentially and rapidly to respond to demand that is increasing heavily . Given the nature of digital businesses today , hyperscale data centres are expected to dominate the data centre market . A report by Data Bridge Market Research estimates that www . intelligentdatacentres . com
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