Datacentre Transformation Needed, but not Understood

By Greg McNevin

November 10, 2008: IDC has tackled the complexities surrounding data centre transformation at its latest Asia/Pacific InfraVision conference, with an end user survey finding that the top three challenges businesses face are expansion into new business opportunities, controlling cost of businesses, and improving customer satisfaction.

Conducted across 14 key markets in Asia/Pacific (including Japan), the analyst firm’s 2008 "Continuum" End User Survey canvassed 3500 CIOs, IT Directors, and/or IT Managers responsible for the IT decision-making process.

It benchmarked IT spending, IT setup, IT planning environment, across a broad range of technology areas, and found that while most end-users realise the need to transform their data centres, they are at a loss on where to start and who they should partner with.

IDC says that there is also confusion surrounding the ideal type of datacentre that will serve their needs in the future. Frequent questions include:

• When do we know if it is time for our data centre to be replaced/refreshed?
• What kind of power and cooling infrastructure should we build?
• Which new forms of server and storage architectures should we install?
• What type of infrastructure software solutions will help us become more efficient and reduce unplanned downtime?
• How can we become more nimble and adaptive without giving up the ease-of-use which our business is used to?

“A transformation is the need of the day; and we are not talking about replacing any one IT product, but rather rejuvenating the entire data centre that drives IT within an organisation,” says Avneesh Saxena, IDC’s Group Vice President, Asia/Pacific Systems, Storage and Software Research.

“As significant amounts of time, money and effort go into building a new data centre, it is important for end users to be clear about how to plan, build and manage their data centres efficiently.”

IDC classifies data centres today into three primary categories based on the type of business. Avneesh says that Web 2.0 data centres are currently leading the transformation by setting new standards in design and architecture.

“These companies are fairly new and hence starting from scratch in the kind of IT that will support their business model,” he notes, adding that hosted/managed and traditional data centres are the ones that need to transform, in order to stay competitive and meet new business objectives.

Comment on this story