Telcos aiming big with their data centres

Infonetics Research has been delving into operators’ strateges for data center expansion and related issues such as interconnection and virtualization, and it says there’s a bit of a rush going on.

Not a gold rush along the lines of the the bandwidth frenzy in the late 1990s (heaven forbid, won’t do that again!) but at the very least a bout of restrained excitement and underlying confidence.

Infonetics has been interviewing 19 major telcos, cable operators, data center/content specialists, and colocation providers that have data centers and together represent 20 per cent of the world’s telecom carrier revenue.

"Service providers seeking to bolster their financial picture and gain a piece of the cloud service revenue pie are leveraging a captive customer base and expanding data center offerings to include virtualization technologies and even new networking facilities like Fibre Channel over Ethernet," according Sam Barnett, directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics Research.

The survey shows that more money is being put into the medium, large and super-sized data centres over the next two years, with the super-sized ones growing the most. Infonetics says that the this growth is being driven by network convergence and the demand for virtualization which has turned into a growing business for cloud services.

Of the companies polled the top two data center application strategies were running applications on a fully virtualized infrastructure and replicating applications and
data across data centers based on demand. It also found that the use of legacy data centre interconnection (DCI) technologies, leased dark fiber, and SONET/SDH will slow over the next two years to make way for wavelength, IP/MPLS, and Ethernet transport.

See our recent interview on Web-scale data centres below.