Data Centre Managers Under Pressure from Lean Budgets
Data Centre Managers Under Pressure from Lean Budgets
January 14, 2009: According to Symantec’s 2008 State of the Data Center report, managers are under increasing pressure to “do more with less” as service levels, performance demands and customer service expectations shoot up, but budgets come way down.
Symantec’s second annual study found that data centre managers are trapped between two conflicting goals – more demanding user expectations and higher levels of performance, yet reducing costs remain the primary objective for the data centre.
The report also found that data centre staffing remains problematic, servers and storage continue to be underutilised and disaster recovery plans are out of date.
Conducted in September and October of 2008 by Applied Research, the study targeted 1,600 data centre managers in Global 5000 and large public sector institutions located in 21 countries. Of those surveyed, 75 percent reported user expectations are rising gradually or rapidly.
Furthermore, 60 percent saw meeting the service levels demanded by the organisation to be more difficult or much more difficult to meet, while only 10 percent saw service levels to be easier to meet.
“This research confirms what we are seeing in the field,” says Rob Soderbery, senior vice president of Symantec’s Storage and Availability Management Group. “Attention has turned to initiatives that will drive immediate cost reduction, rather than longer term ROI driven programs. Storage has been a primary focus of these initiatives as the demand for capacity continues to rise, despite economic challenges.”
Key objectives for the year were overwhelming cited as being reducing costs, and the means of achieving this included initiatives such as automation of routine tasks (cited by 42 percent of respondents), cross-training staff (40 percent) and reducing data centre complexity (35 percent).
Unsurprisingly, when asked about ‘green’ data centre programs respondents indicated that they are indeed pursuing goals along these lines, but primarily due to cost benefits.
Regarding staffing, 36 percent of those canvassed reported being understaffed (and only 4 percent reported the opposite), while 43 percent say finding qualified applicants is a big or huge problem.
To address the staffing issue companies are leaning on outsourcing and training. Nearly half (45 percent) outsource primarily to give data center staff more time to focus on other tasks. The top three leading IT functions that businesses are outsourcing include business continuity (46 percent), backups (43 percent) and storage management (39 percent). Training is seen as strategic by 68 percent of the respondents, with 78 percent expecting training budgets to rise or stay constant over the next two years.
The study also found that data centre servers were operating at just 53 percent of capacity, while storage utilization was even lower at 50 percent. Due to this, Symantec found a flurry of activity aimed at increasing utilisation, including server consolidation (80 percent of respondents), server virtualisation (77 percent), storage virtualisation (76 percent), continuous data protection (71 percent) and storage resource management (71 percent).
Overall, Symantec says that this year’s study highlights just how important reigning in costs will be in 2009, with managers literally given a mandate to do more with less and companies scrambling to find solutions that have an immediate effect on cost and efficiency.
“IT managers and executives are in a tough spot,” says Soderbery. “Cost reduction is a non-negotiable objective this year, while user expectations remain high and demand continues to rise. We are seeing this translate into interest in solutions that provide customers with confidence and deliver immediate benefits in reducing server and storage spend without disrupting today’s environment.”
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