Companies intent on investing large amounts of money in new IT equipment over the next few years could be grossly underestimating the extra space and power they will need to accommodate it, according to research.

A survey of 250 European companies conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of datacentre hosting company Global Switch, suggests that 70 percent of IT managers in financial institutions are planning to increase their IT spending in 2007. However, 45 percent of them do not think this will put extra demand on datacentre floor space, while 53 percent are convinced it will not result in increased power consumption.

Global Switch European managing director Paul van der Hilst conceded that some of the proposed investments could actually be designed to replace and consolidate legacy systems rather than expand them. Furthermore, installing new, more energy efficient, hardware and management software could also help keep power bills down. Nevertheless, he insisted that a lot of the companies will still find it too expensive to own, upgrade or maintain their own datacentres and server farms.

‘”There is a lot of space today that is badly in need of upgrading, and companies need to weigh the cost of doing that against outsourcing datacentre operations to purpose-built environments,” van de Hilst said. “Depending on how many servers and applications need to be hosted, there can be economies of scale in sharing the costs of power, cooling and security systems with other large companies in modern datacentres already equipped with the latest technology.”

The survey also found that 29 percent of pharmaceutical and online firms expect their datacentre space requirements to remain unchanged, while 27 percent assume that planned investments will not impact power consumption.

Meanwhile, all business service providers expect an increase in both datacentre power and spatial needs.