Data Center Handbook

8Overview of Data Centers in Korea

Minseok Kwon, Mingoo Kim, and Hanwook Bae

Samsung SDS, Seoul, South Korea

8.1 Introduction

8.1.1 Data Center Market in Korea

The Republic of Korea ranked first out of 155 countries in the 2012 ICT Development Index (IDI) that was published by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and is continuously growing in economy based on the growth of ICT.

The Korean government established a plan for vitalizing the data center industry and is planning to begin its operation shortly. This is based on the idea that the ICT domain is the foundation of the nation’s growth and the significance of data centers is magnified as the supporting infrastructure for the expanding big data and cloud computing.

According to the research data surveyed by the Korea IT Service industry Association (ITSA) in 2012, there are 81 major data centers in Korea, and within the 68 that responded, 22 data centers have whitespace of larger than 4000 m², and 17 data centers are between 1000 and 4000 m².

The data center market size has grown from $325 million in 2005 and $505 million in 2007 to $900 million in 2010, and it is expected in the industry to reach $2 billion in 2015.

In spite of the market size and the significance, data center is not classified as an industrial category nor does such an industry exist, so the problems are that an accurate size of the market is difficult to verify and that the regulations for general commercial buildings are evenly applied ...