The Coolest Data Center Companies In 2021: The Data Center 50
From AWS and AMD to Dell Technologies and Equinix, here are the 50 coolest data center companies in the world today.
The 50 Coolest Data Center Companies
The overall data center market hasn’t felt any significant impact from the global COVID-19 pandemic as cloud titans like Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft continue to pour billions each quarter into new facilities or expanding their data center footprints.
With many enterprises using a mix of on-premises, colocation and cloud infrastructure, the hybrid cloud era is under way with many large IT players throwing their hat into the ring over the past 12 months. Market-leading chip companies such as AMD are investing heavily in the data center market, while colocation vendors are raising billions each year in funding from investors and private equity groups.
IT research firm Gartner expects end-user spending on global data center infrastructure to reach $200 billion in 2021, an increase of 6 percent from 2020.
From the world’s largest providers of servers, storage, power and networking data center infrastructure to colocation and public cloud giants, CRN breaks down the 50 most important data center players in the market today.
Amazon Web Services
Andy Jassy, CEO
Headquarters: Seattle
Amazon Web Services opened the most hyperscale data centers across the globe in 2020 by spending billions to accommodate the skyrocketing demand for its cloud computing and services. AWS’ hybrid cloud AWS Outposts offering extends AWS’ cloud infrastructure, tools and services into customers on-premises data centers or colocation sites. AWS CEO Jassy is set to become CEO of Amazon later this year.
AMD
Lisa Su, President, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
AMD is making massive strides and inroads into the data center market with its planned $35 billion acquisition of Xilinx, which will boost its data center product suite. The chipmaker has been specializing in high-performance innovation for over 50 years in the data center. AMD plans to dive deeper into the channel in 2021 with plans to double channel staff and MDF.
Arista Networks
Jayshree Ullal, President, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
Arista Networks has been a staple in the data center networking market for years. The networking specialist is an industry leader in cognitive cloud networking for large data centers and campus environments, significantly boosting its position last year with the acquisition of Big Switch Networks. Arista captured $2.3 billion in revenue in 2020.
Broadcom
Hock Tan, President, CEO
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
Broadcom sells a slew of data center products from networking and storage infrastructure to SAN technology and automation. The global semiconductor specialist is an innovator in high-performance devices for data center, cloud and AI networks. Broadcom’s security portfolio has been taken to the next level with its $10.7 billion acquisition of Symantec’s Enterprise business.
Cato Networks
Shlomo Kramer, Co-Founder, CEO
Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Israel
Cloud networking and SD-WAN specialist Cato Networks closed more than $200 million in funding in 2020 with the goal of extending its leadership in secure access service edge (SASE), which combines SD-WAN with security. Over the past five years, Cato has added over 650 enterprise customers with more than 7,000 locations across 100 countries.
Cisco Systems
Chuck Robbins, Chairman, CEO
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
Cisco, which has dominated the networking data center space for decades, is doubling down on the edge and cloud-based offerings. The nearly $50 billion company offers switches, routers, security and hyperconverged infrastructure to its legions of customers. Cisco acquired a total of eight companies in 2020, from AI and video analytics specialists to cloud vendors.
Citrix Systems
David Henshall, President, CEO
Headquarters: Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
The software standout provides an array of data center offerings including SD-WAN, traffic management, application delivery management, analytics to boost performance as well as its own hypervisor. Citrix is set to acquire Wrike, a developer of work management and collaborative workspace software, for $2.25 billion this year.
CoreSite
Paul Szurek, President, CEO
Headquarters: Denver
CoreSite owns 24 data centers in eight markets across the U.S. The company’s CoreSite Open Cloud Exchange and SDN offerings enable interconnection with dedicated access to leading cloud offerings in partnerships with AWS, Microsoft and Google. CoreSite generated $607 million in revenue in 2020.
CyrusOne
Bruce Duncan, President, CEO
Headquarters: Dallas
CryusOne has more than 50 data centers across the globe offering colocation, hyperscale and built-to-suit environments. The company generated just over $1 billion in revenue in 2020 with approximately 1,000 customers as it continues to double down on public cloud partnerships such as with Google Cloud. CyrusOne in 2020 selected real estate veteran Duncan to lead the company.
Cyxtera
Nelson Fonseca, CEO
Headquarters: Coral Gables, Fla.
The data center colocation provider plans to go public at a $3.4 billion valuation later this year. Cyxtera operates 61 data centers across nearly 30 markets worldwide with more than 2,300 customers. To become a public company trading on the Nasdaq, Cyxtera plans to merge with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Starboard Value Acquisition.
Dell Technologies
Michael Dell, Founder, Chairman, CEO
Headquarters: Round Rock, Texas
Dell Technologies remains the largest data center infrastructure provider worldwide with a market- leading portfolio of storage, servers and hyperconverged offerings. Dell is doubling down on modular data center offerings, edge computing and consumption-based hybrid cloud offerings. The company generated $94.2 billion in revenue during its fiscal year 2021.
Digital Realty
William Stein, CEO
Headquarters: Austin, Texas
Digital Realty is the largest colocation data center provider that owns all of its own data centers with more than 280 facilities worldwide in over 20 countries. Throughout 2020, all of Digital Realty’s data centers remained fully operational. In the largest data center acquisition of 2020, Digital Realty purchased European data center giant InterXion for $8.4 billion.
Eaton
Craig Arnold, Chairman, CEO
Headquarters: Dublin, Ireland
In a blockbuster move, Eaton is acquiring fellow power and data center hardware vendor Tripp Lite for $1.65 billion to enhance its power and edge computing business. The data center power management specialist generated nearly $18 billion in revenue during its fiscal year 2020. Eaton is expected to close its Tripp Lite purchase in the middle of 2021.
EdgeConneX
Randy Brouckman, Co-Founder, CEO
Headquarters: Herndon, Va.
EdgeConneX is a data center edge pioneer operating more than 40 data centers across the globe. The company’s EdgeConneX multi-access edge computing infrastructure is used to test 5G networks and power virtual reality platforms, while its EdgeOS is a purpose-built operating system for edge environments. Last year, EdgeConneX was acquired by investment firm EQT Infrastructure for reportedly over $2.5 billion.
Equinix
Charles Meyers, President, CEO
Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.
Equinix is the largest real estate investment trust (REIT) focused on data center and interconnection in the world. The company has over 220 data centers globally and partnerships with all major cloud providers. Last year, Equinix entered the Indian market with the $161 million acquisition of GPX India, purchased 12 Bell Canada data centers for $780 million, and bought bare-metal automation star Packet.
Extreme Networks
Ed Meyercord, President, CEO
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
Extreme Networks is a top data center networking provider on a global basis, providing a wide range of switches, routers, programmable ASICs, Wi-Fi, cloud management and automation offerings to its more than 50,000 customers. The company delivers end-to-end, cloud-driven networking offerings. Extreme further boosted its network capabilities with the acquisition of Aerohive Networks.
Flexential
Chris Downie, CEO
Headquarters: Charlotte, N.C., and Denver
Flexential has a full suite of data center service capabilities with 40 data centers covering nearly all of the major U.S. markets. The company builds on a platform of 3 million square feet of total data center space on its innovative FlexAnywhere 100-GB private network backbone. Flexential was formed in 2017 as a result of Peak 10’s $1.7 billion acquisition of ViaWest.
Fungible
Pradeep Sindhu, Co-Founder, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
Fungible seeks to revolutionize the performance, economics and security of scale-out data centers by enabling the disaggregation of compute and storage resources. The company recently launched Fungible Storage Cluster, dubbing it the world’s fastest all-flash NVMe disaggregated storage platform. Fungible DPU integrates processors for off-loading storage functionalities, a fast network-on-chip networking accelerator and a storage stack.
Sundar Pichai, CEO
Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.
Google was one of the largest spenders on data centers in the world last year, spending billions to meet the high demand for its cloud services. The Google Cloud Platform offers data center networking, block and object storage infrastructure as well as OS-level security, while Google’s Anthos software builds and manages container-based applications that run in data centers.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Antonio Neri, President, CEO
Headquarters: Houston
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is one of the world’s leaders in successfully transitioning its data center infrastructure portfolio into consumption-based offerings via HPE GreenLake. HPE is doubling down on edge computing and channel enablement in 2021, backed by its massive portfolio of servers, storage, switches, automation, cybersecurity, hybrid cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure.
Hitachi Vantara
Gajen Kandiah, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
Hitachi Vantara last year selected former Cognizant president Kandiah to lead the company. Hitachi Vantara specializes in the industrial vertical, while its Smart Data Center combines advanced data center analytics, artificial intelligence and automation alongside its storage or hyperconverged infrastructure. The company recently made its first serious play in the midrange storage market.
IBM
Arvind Krishna, CEO
Headquarters: Armonk, N.Y.
The IBM Cloud network is built on more than 60 data centers in 19 countries and 18 availability zones globally. Under its new CEO Krishna, IBM is realigning its data center strategy, which included the closure of some older data centers. The company offers a slew of data center services, AI capabilities via Watson and infrastructure including servers and storage.
Inspur
Leon Zheng, CEO
Headquarters: China
Inspur has been gaining significant global server market share over the past two years thanks to strong demand in the Asia-Pacific region as well as growing cloud infrastructure sales. The Chinese company provides a wide variety of data center offerings from data center designs and planning to servers, storage and networking infrastructure.
Intel
Pat Gelsinger, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
The data center processor star delivers the capabilities to support data center infrastructure and the most demanding applications with a focus on application acceleration, performance efficiency, data-heavy workloads, flash memory and big data analytics. In a bold move, the company hired VMware CEO and former longtime Intel executive Gelsinger to lead Intel. Gelsinger was Intel’s first-ever CTO.
Juniper Networks
Rami Rahim, CEO
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.
Juniper Networks has been a top data center networking vendor for more than a decade, constantly innovating its vast portfolio of switches, routers, automation software and security with a focus on channel partners. This year, Juniper acquired intent-based networking pioneer Apstra, saying it creates an “unmatched” data center networking company.
Lenovo
Yang Yuanqing, Chairman, CEO
Headquarters: Hong Kong
Lenovo’s data center business has been on fire lately due to high demand for the company’s portfolio of servers, storage, networking and software products, which reached a record high of $1.63 billion in sales during its recent third fiscal quarter. Lenovo is doubling down on channel partners this year in a move to win more market share.
LogicMonitor
Kevin McGibben, President, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Barbara, Calif.
The SaaS-based infrastructure monitoring standout provides visibility into everything inside a data center while automatically correlating data to solve for business outcomes. Last month, LogicMonitor acquired application and performance monitoring specialist Airbrake. The company recently hired former Slack executive Christina Kosmowski as its first president.
Lumen Technologies
Jeff Storey, President, CEO
Headquarters: Monroe, La.
After several large acquisitions by CenturyLink along with its Level 3 Communications merger, a new brand was formed in 2020: Lumen Technologies. Lumen offers a wide variety of data center offerings from adaptive network security and SD-WAN to data services and telecommunications. Storey previously led Level 3 Communications.
Microsoft
Satya Nadella, CEO
Headquarters: Redmond, Wash.
The software behemoth is investing billions each quarter in expanding its ever-growing data center footprint to accommodate demand for Microsoft Azure, with more than 60 cloud regions in 140 countries. Microsoft is doubling down on investments in edge data centers and 5G with Azure Edge Zones, designed to embed compute, storage and networking at the edge of carriers’ 5G networks.
NetApp
George Kurian, President, CEO
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.
NetApp is a top storage infrastructure and data services company that provides everything from hyperconverged and all-flash array infrastructure to workload automation and data backup and recovery offerings in the data center. Last month, NetApp reported third fiscal quarter revenue of nearly $1.5 billion, up 5 percent year over year.
NTT Global Data Centers
Douglas Adams, President, CEO, Americas
Headquarters: Sacramento, Calif.
In 2020, NTT Global Data Centers pledged to invest $7 billion in building new data centers to add to its more than 150 centers worldwide. NTT Global opened two new centers in Chicago and Hillsboro, Ore., in February with plans in 2021 to launch new campuses in Santa Clara, Calif., and Phoenix.
Nutanix
Rajiv Ramaswami, President, CEO
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
The hyperconverged software star recently hired former VMware top executive Ramaswami as its new CEO, and he has said he plans to elevate Nutanix into a $2 billion company. Nutanix is an innovator on the data center and hybrid cloud software front, providing offerings like Calm for app-centric life-cycle management and cloud orchestration, Prism Pro for predictive analytics, and its edge platform Xi IoT.
Nvidia
Jensen Huang, Founder, President, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
Nvidia took its biggest step toward becoming a “data center-scale company” by acquiring networking components star Mellanox Technologies for $7 billion.
The company is constantly improving its chipset power, including with the A100 GPU which Nvidia has said will future-proof data centers for AI. Nvidia is also investing heavily in edge computing such as with its Nvidia EGX platform.
Oracle
Safra Catz, CEO
Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.
Oracle is on schedule to have 36 availability data center regions by mid-2021, a big increase from around 15 regions in 2019. New centers are being built in Australia, Amsterdam, Montreal, Japan and Saudi Arabia, to name a few. The software giant provides data centers services with a focus on full integrated stacks of cloud applications and platform offerings.
Palo Alto Networks
Nikesh Arora, Chairman, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
The cybersecurity standout offers data center products from firewalls, data protection and automated threat discovery to SD-WAN thanks to its acquisition of CloudGenix last year. Palo Alto Networks has spent millions over the past two years buying companies to enter new markets or expand its ever- growing security portfolio, including last month’s acquisition of cloud security startup Bridgecrew.
Pivot3
Bill Stover, CEO
Headquarters: Austin, Texas
Pivot3 is a leading provider of hyperconverged infrastructure for video surveillance, video analytics, VDI and mixed workloads. Pivot3’s Acuity Datacenter series is powered by NVMe flash and optimized by Pivot3’s Intelligence Engine that simplifies performance, data protection and security management to put an end to infrastructure complexity.
Scale Computing
Jeff Ready, CEO
Headquarters: Indianapolis
Scale Computing is an edge computing, virtualization and hyperconverged specialist, leveraging its HC3 self-healing platform to automatically identify, mitigate and correct infrastructure problems in real time and enable applications to achieve maximum uptime, even when local IT resources and staff are scarce. In 2020, Scale Computing increased edge deployments by over 110 percent year over year.
Schneider Electric
Jean-Pascal Tricoire, Chairman, CEO
Headquarters: West Kingston, RI.
Schneider Electric is one of the largest data center power and cooling providers on the world. The company also has been doubling down on data center software and services innovation over the past several years. Schneider Electric generated over $25 billion in revenue during its fiscal year 2020.
Server Technology, a brand of Legrand
John Selldorff, CEO Legrand North and Central America
Headquarters: Reno, Nev.
Server Technology specializes in data center power distribution units and power accessories with more than 12,000 PDU configurations available. The company offers intelligent rack PDUs that provide capacity planning, remote power management capabilities, small form factors and versatility to meet any size data center or edge location. Server Technology’s parent company is Legrand.
SolarWinds
Sudhakar Ramakrishna , President, CEO
Headquarters: Austin, Texas
SolarWinds provides end-to-end data center monitoring and management around network performance, storage, computing, configuration and applications. This year, the company selected former Pulse Secure CEO Ramakrishna as its new leader, replacing Kevin Thompson.
Stack Infrastructure
Brian Cox, CEO
Headquarters: Denver
Specializing in hyperscale demands, Stack Infrastructure owns data centers across the U.S. in eight major markets. The data center colocation company offers Hyper Stack for hyperscale campuses and build-to-suit data centers, Ready Stack for colocation and private data suites, and powered shell options with Power Stack.
Supermicro
Charles Liang, Founder, Chairman, President, CEO
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
Supermicro is striving to become the leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server and storage technology, launching remote testing sites for customers to test cutting-edge processors on its systems. Supermicro has a broad portfolio of data center products from all-flash NVMe storage and HPC severs to motherboards, chassis and networking.
TierPoint
Jerry Kent, Chairman, CEO
Headquarters: St. Louis
TierPoint is a large provider of data center and hybrid cloud offerings that operates more than 40 data centers in 20 U.S. markets and eight multitenant cloud pods. The company also offers a slew of services including colocation, networking, security compliance, disaster recovery and managed services.
Vantage Data Centers
Sureel Choksi, President, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
The fast-growing data center company continues to buy land and build new facilities throughout North America and Europe as it expands its global data center footprint. After raising $3.6 billion in funding in 2020, Vantage Data Centers expanded from six to 12 markets and increased total IT capacity by more than 100MW.
Vapor IO
Cole Crawford, CEO
Headquarters: Austin, Texas
Vapor IO is developing one of the largest edge networking, colocation and exchange platforms at the edge. Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge platform combines multitenant colocation with software-defined interconnection and high-speed networking. The platform offers highly distributed infrastructure for delivering modern, low-latency applications.
Veeam Software
William Largent, Chairman, CEO
Headquarters: Baar, Switzerland
The longtime data center and cloud data protection standout is a software leader in backup and recovery, data protection and advanced monitoring. Veeam’s Availability Suite combines advanced monitoring and analytics with backup, restore and replication capabilities. Veeam was acquired last year by Insight Partners for $5 billion.
Vertiv
Rob Johnson, CEO
Headquarters: Columbus, Ohio
The $4.37 billion data center company provides power and cooling infrastructure, thermal management, racks and enclosures, and a long list of monitoring and IT services. Vertiv has over 20,000 employees with customers in over 130 counties. Last year, Vertiv entered the public market following its merger with GS Acquisition Holdings.
VMware
Zane Rowe, Interim CEO, CFO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
VMware is the dominant force in data center virtualization and one of the world’s largest providers of data center software—from software-defined networking and compute virtualization to native Kubernetes and hybrid cloud. The nearly $12 billon superstar is currently searching for a new CEO after Pat Gelsinger left in February to become CEO of Intel.
vXchnge
Keith Olson, Chairman, CEO
Headquarters: Tampa, Fla.
vXchnge operates 12 colocation data centers across the U.S., delivering scalability and security along with an infrastructure management platform. The company is investing heavily at the edge, where it believes the future of colocation will reside. vXchnge is led by Olson, who has over 30 years of industry experience.
Western Digital
David Goeckeler, CEO
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
Western Digital made a bold move in hiring longtime Cisco networking and security veteran Goeckeler as its CEO last year. The company offers a variety of data center storage systems and hard disk drives. Western Digital’s new Zoned Storage initiative is an open standards-based strategy to enable data centers to scale efficiently for the Zettabyte storage capacity era.