Critical Thinking is a weekly column on innovation in data center infrastructure design and management. More about the column and the author here. Since the Open Compute Project was founded in 2011 the balance of power in the data center industry has continued to shift.

True, most of the world’s data centers – about four million of them, according to some estimates – are still owned and operated by enterprises. But the bulk of those are small IT rooms or closets. Most large cloud service providers still use servers or other gear from traditional technology suppliers but have also seized the initiative by sourcing custom hardware from ODMs as well as developing and deploying OCP equipment. There are now more than 390 hyper-scale data centers in the world, and that figure is set to rise to more than 500 by 2020, according to the latest estimates by Synergy Research Group.

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