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1. Introduction
Data centers are a fundamental part of the IT operations and provide computing facilities to large entities, such as, online social networks, cloud computing services, online businesses, hospitals, and universities (Brady, Kapur, Summers, & Thompson, 2013). Data center entails a cluster of resources that are interconnected through communication links, to host applications, store data, and provide various other services, such as, the cloud computing services (Khan, Othman, Madani, & Khan, 2013; Shuja, Gani, Shamshirband, Ahmad, & Bilal, 2016; Khan, Othman, Khan, Akhtar, & Madani, 2015). A typical data center comprises of floor space for accommodating IT equipment together with all the essential cabling required to connect the servers, power distribution systems, climate control normally using Computer Room Air Conditioning (CARC) devices, and physical security mechanisms (Bilal et al., 2012; Bilal, Rehman, Khalid, Hameed, & Alvarez, 2014).
Data centers have experienced rapid growth in the number of hosted servers. Large Internet corporations and IT equipment manufacturers such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Dell, IBM, and HP are continually expanding their existing data centers and building new ones. Global IT systems revenue is increasing at the rate of 53.7% yearly and the contribution of data center equipment to this growth is up to 3.5% (Connel, 2012). This notable growth needs to be examined in detail in terms of total number of server and manufacturers’ market share. The estimated market segmentation of various corporations in terms of server farms, and the market share of the leading server manufacturers in 2013, is presented in Table 1 (Google Inc., 2015; Pearn, 2012; Netcraft, 2013; Amazon, n.d.; Miller, 2009; Reichle & De-Massari, 2011; Miller, 2012; New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, n.d.; Yevgeniy, 2015; Statistica, 2015; Gallo, 2012; U.S Department of Energy, 2015) and Table 2 (Gartner, 2014), respectively.
Table 1. | Organization | Estimated Server Count |
| Google | 2,376,640 |
| Microsoft | 1,000,000 |
| Amazon | 158,000 |
| HP | 380,000 |
| Facebook | 180,000 |
| Yahoo! | 100,000 |
| eBay | 54,011 |
Server market share (US dollars)
| Company | Revenue | Market Share |
| HP | 3,839,527,072 | 24.8% |
| IBM | 3,623,543,805 | 34.9% |
| Dell | 2,074,167,350 | 14.3% |
| Cisco | 646,100,000 | 3.3% |
| Oracle | 574,712,435 | 4.1% |
| Other Vendors | 2,904,637,567 | 18.7% |
| Total | 13,662,688,230 | 100% |