New research sponsored by a data center service provider has found that companies are expecting their in-house data center capacity to decrease going forward, due to economic and server consolidation trends. Companies expect their total data center capacity (by number of racks) to shrink 1.1% in the year to March 2010, the survey found. Additionally, the survey found that nearly all (95% of companies) operate their own data center, while about 20% also use an IT outsourcer's data center, and 11% use a co-location service. Survey authors think that the main reasons for expecting capacity to shrink are IT consolidation and the combined response of utility/cloud computing or server virtualization, with the need for fewer servers. Not that data centers will be doing any less-survey researchers say there will be more and greater workloads-just on more consolidated or outsourced infrastructures.

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