In a recent survey, Storage growth, business growth, and the virtualization of critical applications was said to be the greatest drivers for data center capacity growth in Europe.
The survey was commissioned by Digital Realty Trust, a provider of data center and colocation solutions, and was conducted by Forrester (News - Alert) Consulting.
As indicated, Forrester Research conducted an online survey of organizations in the European portion covering data center decision makers in the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Ireland. The survey was based on surveys of 266 senior-level decision makers with responsibility for data centers. Almost around 62 percent of the respondents work at firms with more than 1,000 employees. The survey included 32 percent from UK, 28 percent from Germany, 24 percent from France, 10 percent from Netherlands, and 6 percent from Ireland.
The survey revealed that the top expected drivers of data center capacity growth were storage growth (56 percent), business growth (48 percent), and virtualization (42 percent). The next tier of drivers included big data (36 percent), business continuity (26 percent), and data center consolidation (23 percent).
"This information further enhances our understanding of current and prospective client requirements. In a notable shift from last year, the top three drivers of data center capacity growth were storage growth, business growth, and virtualization, versus security, disaster recovery, and the supply/reliability of power in the 2013 survey. This is consistent with the shifting view of the data center from a cost center to a revenue center, and a critical component of underlying business growth," Bernard Geoghegan, managing director, EMEA, for Digital Realty said in a statement.
The survey also revealed about future plans for data center capacity planning, for which almost 92 percent respondents indicated their plans to expand in some form within the next four years. Also, when making decisions about new data center facility investments, the most important considerations for respondents were the data center's network connectivity options.
Forrester Research (News - Alert) is said to have conducted the same survey across organizations in US, UK, Singapore, Japan, Germany, Hong Kong, France, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and Ireland to evaluate their data center investment plans and drivers.