Data centres across Europe are bulging at the seams, with the majority operating at 82% of maximum capacity.

Aside from space constraints, a study undertaken by Hewlett-Packard highlights the other pressures on data centres: a lack of energy, cooling issues, and the impact of environmental legislation.

Surveying over a thousand CIOs and business unit heads, HP found that the most common data centre focus is on short-term programmes of data centre rationalisation and consolidation.

The report shows that despite a tightening of IT budgets brought on by the credit crunch, 60% of companies still plan to invest in data centre improvement in the coming year, with UK companies averaging 3.4 data centre projects a year (a figure expected to rise to 4.2 in three years). The survey also identified a key gripe: 72% of CIOs feel “business heads fail to understand how data centre issues are, in fact, truly business issues”.