The past years I have worked in and towards the datacenter “industry” in Norway. The experience that this work has given me is that there are possibilities here to make a real difference. The difference I am talking about is about the important efficiency side when it comes to the use of electrical power usage. Many of the existing data centers are not very efficient when it comes to the power usage and has in my opinion some distance to go.
If we compare the above with the development within the hardware industry for servers, routers, switches and other elements that hold an important role in the production of services, hosted from data centers, we can see that there is gains to be made.
There are some companies out there that are changing the datacenter game in many aspects and I am impressed with how they do it.
Looking at what I believe are the “pushers” in this industrial space Google and Facebook we can see that they are aiming high when it comes to efficiency in a range off deliverables. The nice thing about these two are that they set standards that others can learn from and in that respect we might have service offerings of digital services that are more efficient.
The more “commercial” suppliers of datacenter services in Europe at least are among others the US based Equinix that are pushing development of the traditional datacenter industry from a Co location product to a full-blown “service provider”. They still have a way to go, in my opinion :-), but I see that there are some players out there that will have some challenges down the road…
This space is interesting to be part of and with the “given” above I am sure there are combination of business lines and cross industries we have not yet seen that can do even more in this fast evolving industry.
regards
bjørn