A massive datacentre meltdown is expected next year in the US, and it will hit the IT industry like the first computer worm did, according to Subodh Bapat, a vice president in the eco-computing team at Sun Microsystems.

"You'll see a massive failure in a year," Bapat said at a dinner with reporters on Monday. "We are going to see a datacentre failure of that scale."

"That scale" referred to the problems caused by the worm created by Cornell graduate student Robert Morris Jr. in 1988. His worm infected about 5 percent of the Unix boxes on the Internet, freaked people out, and helped jump-start the security industry.

Of course, it's just a prediction, so there is no guarantee that it will happen. But it does seem possible. Data centres have mushroomed with the flood of processes and jobs being turned over to the Internet. Companies have built up their datacentres, but even with technologies like virtualisation it's been tough to keep up. At some point, a datacentre is going to crash and people will panic.

On a more positive note, Bapat and other Sun executives said that the IT industry is also on the verge of a construction boom that, if it happens, will lead to big orders for equipment for makers of servers, storage systems, and other data centre equipment.

The typical life span of a datacentre is only about 10 to 12 years, said the Sun executives. Thus, a lot of those datacentres built at the beginning of the dot-com era need to be rebuilt. Other companies like Facebook are expanding rapidly as well -- Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos mentioned Facebook several times, hinting at the possibility that Sun is working with, or is trying to work with, the darling of social networking.

US national laboratories and universities are also looking at new centres. Next year, one of the national labs has plans to build a data centre that will take up 500,000 square feet and consume 50 megawatts -- big data centres now take up 400,000 square feet and chew up 40 megawatts, Sun executives said.