Enterprises in Australia are forecast to spend $2.5 billion on data centre systems this year, slightly up on $2.3 billion in 2014 according to Gartner.
Companies will be investing in enterprise communications applications, enterprise network equipment, servers and external controller-based disk storage.
The number of data centres in Australia continues to decline as enterprises focus on improving data centre economics, according to the analyst firm.
According to Gartner, there are 62,314 data centres in Australia. However, only 11 facilities are classified as large data centres with at least 1000 racks of equipment and 20,000 square feet.
Seventy eight facilities are enterprise data centres with at least 250 racks of equipment or 5000 square feet. The majority are classed as single deployments or small racks in computer rooms.
Speaking at the Gartner infrastructure, operations and data centre summit in Sydney, Gartner managing vice-president Michele Caminos said the future data centre is moving towards an integrated facility made up of software-defined, optimised resources, new infrastructure models, operational models and hybrid alternatives over the next five years.
A software-defined data centre is a layer of abstraction above multiple other software-defined layers such as network, virtualization and storage whereby data centres are controlled/automated from a single control plane using a common set of APIs.
Traditional infrastructure such as servers has changed too.
“We took a look at some of the market share of the top five traditional server vendors. In 2010, they equalled 74 per cent of the overall market share of servers. In 2014, it dropped down to 56 per cent,” she said.
“The main reason is that the type of servers we are bringing into the data centre are changing. We are bringing in white box vendor servers and these are all going to help the hyper scale data centre and support Web-scale workloads.”
In addition, public cloud service providers are focusing on disaggregation of data centre components, such as standard building blocks, direct attached storage and scale out infrastructure.
“Price, choice and ease of use are key in the need to drive strategy for systems of records, competition and differentiation,” said Caminos.
Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick
Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU, or take part in the Computerworld conversation on LinkedIn: Computerworld Australia