The datacentre business seems to be very much alive

Last week I went to Cloud Expo Europe at ExCeL.

(Yes, there was a tube strike. No, that didn't affect me much. Had to walk from London Bridge Station to Tower Gateway to get to the DLR, but walking past HMS Belfast, Tower Bridge, and the Tower of London isn't such an imposition.)

Now, "Cloud Expo" is the umbrella event. There are a number of co-located shows - DevOps Live, Cloud and Cyber Security Expo, Big Data and AI World, and Data Centre World.

The one absolutely conspicuous thing to take away was that, despite it being notionally a Cloud Expo, the Data Centre World part was as big as all the others put together. It's all a bit swankier than when I was designing, building, and running small datacentres too.

But the place was awash with power - generators, UPS, PDUs (power strips can be really fancy and light up in all sorts of colours now), cabling. Not to mention DCIM, inventory systems, management software, security, cages, equipment lift systems, fire suppression. The whole shooting match, as it were.

This is interesting. I've had the impression for a while that the datacentre (or colocation, as a variation) business isn't in much of a decline, and this reinforced that view. There's still a lot of on-premise compute, it's not going away.

Despite the idea being propagated by some that the only way is Cloud, it appears that Cloud is additive to on-premise. The vendors I chatted to seemed to be going strong.

The rest of Cloud Expo was really quite muted. But not only was it small, and quiet, but there was really nothing new out there. It had been 2 years since I was last out talking to vendors in person, and the impression I got was that the market is simply stagnant.

Like all business sectors, everything's cyclical, but I suspect that mourning the death of the datacentre and on-premise (including colocation) is premature.