A number of factors, many of which are the direct result of the recent economic downturn, are combining to make increased data center construction and renovations increasingly likely. Forecasts by IDC and Gartner point to a significant uptick in server sales for 2010, suggesting that a corresponding increase in new data center construction projects and renovations of aging data centers may follow suit.

Reuters has reported that Gartner is forecasting server shipment growth percentage in the range of mid to high single digits for 2010; the research firm predicts that the revenue growth rate will lag slightly behind shipment growth, however. These encouraging numbers follow a rather dismal 2009, which saw server revenue decline by 18.3%, with a unit shipment decline of 16.6%, according to Gartner. Research firm IDC estimates server revenue decline at 18.9%, down to $43.2 billion, with unit shipments down 18.6% to 6.6 million units. Thus, IDC’s estimate suggests that unit shipments and revenue kept fairly close pace in their decline, despite Gartner’s estimate that revenue demonstrated a larger percentage decrease than did unit shipments.

more of the Data Center Journal article from Jeffrey Clark