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Australian organisations are forecast to spend $A2.5 billion on datacentre systems in 2015, an increase from $2.3 billion in 2014.
According to Gartner, this includes spending on enterprise communications applications, enterprise network equipment, servers and external controller-based (disk) storage.
Findings are also in line with Gartner's annual CIO survey, which has cloud and infrastructure/data centres in the top four technology priorities of Australian CIOs in 2015.
Despite this spending increase, the number of data centres in Australia continues to decline as Australian businesses are focused on improving data centre economics, coupled with agility and management.
Of the 62,314 datacentres in Australia in 2015, only 11 are classified as large datacentres, defined by Gartner as having at least 1,000 racks of equipment and/or at least 20,000 square feet, while 78 are enterprise data centres with at least 250 racks of equipment and/or at least 5,000 square feet.
Also, the vast majority are classed as single deployments or small racks in "computer rooms" in smaller companies.
Speaking in the opening keynote of the Gartner Infrastructure, Operations & Data Centre Summit 2015 in Sydney, Gartner managing vice president Michele Caminos said that the Nexus of Forces (Cloud, social, mobile and information) and the Internet of Things together are creating a new digital business world that requires a new approach to datacentre demand and management.
“The future datacentre is moving toward a more fluid architecture, focusing on workflow relative to how it interoperates and collaborates with other systems and cloud components to support digital business, rather than workload,” Caminos says.
“It is also focused on what the work is doing and supporting, rather than where it is located. Organisations have to look at their datacentre environment at a much higher level today.”
Gartner says an integrated datacentre will help organisations support the transformation to digital business capabilities and models.
It defines an integrated datacentre as a combined software and hardware entity, which is becoming more logical in function, in addition to its traditional physical nature.
According to Gartner, there are six key technology and process foundations that taken holistically make up the integrated datacentre: software-defined, optimised resources, new infrastructure models, new operational models, hybrid alternatives and nonstop operations.
1 - Software-defined:
A software-defined datacentre is a layer of abstraction above multiple other software-defined layers (network, virtualisation, storage), whereby datacentres are controlled/automated from a single control plane using a common set of APIs, wherever they are located.
According to Gartner, the idea is that datacentre resources would be placed where they made the most economic sense, and the allocation and use of those resources could be controlled by rules and analytics, allowing both workflows and workloads to be moved/directed where they best served the business at any particular point in time.
