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n a new report, IMS Research forecasts that the market for power and cooling products supporting data centers will be worth more than $15 billion by 2014. The report, entitled Data Center Infrastructure Yearbook, shows that the market will grow modestly over the near-term, from approximately $13 billion in 2011.

The study quantifies the market for uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), floor and cabinet-level power distribution, racks and enclosures, and cooling products. The analysis found that UPS is by far the largest market, worth more than $8 billion in 2011.
Jason dePreaux, associate director with IMS Research, says that growth in the data center infrastructure market is a balance between opposing forces. “Digitization continues unabated,” he adds. “Mobile data, electronic health records, and richer Internet connectivity drive data processing and storage needs which, in turn, requires more data centers. At the same time, new server generations offer greater performance per watt, which somewhat mitigates the need for additional critical infrastructure.”

dePreaux believes that economic conditions often play the role of tiebreaker. “The cloudy economic picture severely dampens companies’ willingness to spend on capital-intensive projects like data centers,” he warns.

The new report forecasts the highest growth for products that are used to help improve efficiency in data centers. For example, IMS found that the need to more closely monitor electricity use is reshaping the power distribution market, with intelligent hardware which commands higher prices than their “dumb” counterparts. Cooling equipment is also changing to cope with high-density computing environments. Even enclosures are changing to better facilitate increased airflow and power cabling, notes the study.

Further, over the past five years, three vendors have consolidated their positions in the market via acquisition. The report found that Schneider Electric, Emerson and Eaton combined to hold 47 percent of the total data center infrastructure market last year.

“The big three have each made multiple acquisitions to enhance product portfolios and extend geographic reach,” concludes dePreaux. “Beyond this are literally hundreds of vendors that have carved out smaller niches around the world.”

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A Bell Labs study released indicates that data traffic on metropolitan access and aggregation networks is set to increase by 560% by 2017, driven by demand for video and the proliferation of data centers. Even more significantly, the study showed that by 2017 more than 75% of that traffic will stay in metro networks, as compared to 57% today.

The labs’ “Metro Network Traffic Growth: An Architecture Impact Study” also indicated that traffic from video services will skyrocket by as much as 720% and data center traffic will increase more than 440% during the same time period. Combined, video and data center traffic are the key drivers to the overall forecast increase of 560% traffic growth in the metro.

Fast-rising demand for video, cloud, and other high-bandwidth services is driving enterprises, service providers, and web-scale companies to bring content closer to their customers as they try to better manage quality of experience (QoE) and improve operational efficiency, Alcatel-Lucent says. The most popular video content, for instance, is being cached more toward the edge of the network so it can be delivered to customers locally over metro networks rather than being accessed from a central cache over the backbone network. In addition, the growing demand for cloud services means that enterprises and operators are adding data centers within the metro area to support service delivery.

These shifting traffic patterns mean more traffic will now stay in the metro – as noted earlier, 75% by 2017, as compared with 57% today. Service providers will require a network architecture that will ensure that the metro remains a key contributor – rather than bottleneck – in the new virtualized environment, Alcatel-Lucent asserts.

The forecasted growth is expected to have a considerable impact on service providers’ networks, says Alcatel-Lucent. Service providers will need to evolve to a network architecture that is optimized for the cloud – to help control costs, guarantee quality, and deliver new revenue-generating services to connect users and the cloud. To address this need, service providers must move toward a cloud–optimized network, leveraging integrated IP, optical, and management platforms together with software-defined networking (SDN). This will allow them to deploy networks that meet dynamic and rapid growth in customer demand for video and other high-bandwidth cloud services with instantaneous access over the metro network, the company concludes.

As manufacturers of optical-communication components are increasingly facing cost pressure and procurement difficulties, an increasing number are outsourcing their manufacturing to China.

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