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Unfortunately, not even the improved outlook for disaster recovery services will be able to bring the supply/demand equation into balance, experts say.
The "space glut" that resulted from a combination of overbuilding and the dot.com and CLEC crashes improved only slightly in the late spring and summer. As of June 1, Grubb & Ellis estimated that nearly nearly 40 percent of telecom real estate stood vacant, while a study on finished colocation space by TeleGeography found a 55 percent vacancy rate.
In the weeks since Sept. 11, a number of data center providers have either filed for Chapter 11 or announced consolidations that included the sale of built-out facilities. Those include:

Those facilities will come onto an already crowded market for finished data center and colocation space. Companies including Sungard, PSI.net, US Tech Centers and Aperian are each seeking to sell multiple data centers. Numerous other providers are quietly shopping at least property.
"How much weaker can it get?" wondered Forsyth. "When you are at the bottom, you can roll around on the floor awhile, but hopefully you won't go through it."
Peregrine's Jensen said the inventory "indicates that the major operators already anticipate a lessening of demand, probably for longer than six months."
"These (companies) would not be so precipitously shutting down their projects if they had hope of anything getting better anytime in the near future," said Jensen.
"People have realized that empty buildings, empty networks and empty data centers are not assets at all - they are liabilities, and expensive ones at that," said Wanger.

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