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Forbes

We are currently in the biggest data center construction boom in history. At the same time, this boom is dramatically weakening the future flexibility and financial performance of information technology.

How can this be? It’s the old domino effect at work again.

The number of servers in the U.S. has grown from 5 million in 2000, to 10 million in 2005, to a projected 15 million in 2010. More servers eat up more electricity and energy costs go up. To avoid future energy shortages caused by increasing IT demands, 10 more power plants need to be built to the tune of $2 billion to $6 billion each and their cost is ultimately going to get passed on to IT through increased utility bills.

If we are going to install an additional 5 million servers before 2010, senior IT executives had better understand the true cost of server ownership in order to make the right investment decisions. IT power consumption is going up so rapidly that data centers, which used to cost $20 million to build, now can cost $100 million–and some are in the $500 million range, excluding hardware and network costs.

An interesting article from Forbes talking about the demand for data centers. The more end users we bring online to the internet, the more markets we connect, the more data and infrastructure we need to provide services whether it’s free email, online shopping and networking or uploading photos. This brings extra demand for data center space and IT, at the same time it can bring real opportunities for revenue and brand exposure – being able to target consumers in China for example could bring real revenues to your business – the challenge is at what point the benefit/revenue from deploying more IT exceeds the perceived direct and indirect costs of doing so. But then is this not why we’re moving to a virtual world (IT wise), where it doesn’t matter where (or how) the server is provisioned, that the application or service works – that I can failover data centers not servers. That New York can run out of my data center in Korea whilst I carry out scheduled (or unscheduled) upgrades/fixes, or where the data center can run wherever the energy or people/infrastructure costs are cheapest.

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