According to IHS in-row and in-rack data centre cooling sales are not producing the double-digit growth it had hoped for-- instead 2013 row/rack revenues are down by -5-6%.
In comparison the overall 2013 perimeter cooling market is down by -2-3%
"There are a few reasons for the decline of row/rack revenue,” IHS says. “These products are used either as stand-alone cooling solutions in small data centers or as supplementary cooling in high-density applications."
In the first above mentioned use-case a growing number of companies are outsourcing their small data centres to either colocation or cloud providers, ie large data centres using traditional room cooling.
Meanwhile the second use-case, supplementary cooling for high-density data centre areas, is also not much of a growth opportunity-- rack/row products only offer "significant" energy savings only once rack densities approach the 8-10kW range, but average densities remain in the sub-5kW range and data centres operating at higher densities are comparatively few.
In addition rack/row product growth also faces a still sluggish data centre market, even if the analyst says "when the market returns, IHS does expect there to be an eventual increase in densities that will again call for high-density cooling solutions like row/rack products. This just might be a little further out than originally expected.”
Go Adoption of In-Row and In-Rack Cooling Slow as Data Centre Market Struggles (IHS)
