UK investment in new data center build will be more than double that spent on retro-fitting existing facilities in 2008-09.

New build data center investment will reach £850 million for 2008-09 (up £50 million on the previous year) as investment for refitting of data centers is estimated to be £400 million in the same period revealing continuing market resilience.
Planned investment in relocating data centers will fall slightly to £150 million 08-09 compared with 07-08 while data center outsourcing is expected to rise by one quarter to £100 million. The sample of over 400 senior data center operators taken at DatacenterDynamicsLondon:08 revealed that UK owners/operators have around 125,000 racks and around 8 million square feet of data center space.
"The responses of a unique sample of senior data center professionals who attended DatacenterDynamicsLondon:08 prove that even in uncertain economic times investment in data centers is stable and in some sectors is still growing. It is clear that owner operators are looking to maximise the returns on their investment but the responses show that continued data center investment underpins business performance," said Dan Scarbrough, CEO of DatacenterDynamics Ltd.
Respondents worked in a wide variety of industries including telecoms (14.4%) engineering (13.1%) finance (11.7%) manufacturing (10.2%). Other industries included retail, construction, government and IT. Almost one third said they were considering moving their data center from a city location, around half said they were investing in blade technology and more than half said they would invest in IT continuity planning for their "whole of data center" options.
The key themes to be addressed in the coming year included power consumption (22.7%) followed by TCO (15.5%), cooling higher densities (15.1%) and downtime (13%).
More than 1,200 delegates attended the two day event, held on 11 and 12 November at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London. There were in excess of 50 seminars and lectures across the two days, plus workshops, live demonstrations, and an exhibition hall featuring 100 of the leading names working in, or supplying, the datacenter field.