Data centre managers are caught between two conflicting goals – more demanding user expectations and higher performance, and reducing costs.
Its staffing remains problematic, servers, and storage continue to be underutilised and disaster recovery plans requires constant fine-tuning and upgrade. Green data centre initiatives are being pursued, primarily based on cost benefits.
These are the findings of Symantec Corp published in its 2008 State of the Data Center Report.
The second annual report of Symantec is the result of a survey conducted in September and October by Applied Research.
The study targeted 50 companies from India, ranging from 5,000 to more than 50,000 employees, with the median company having between 10,000 and 19,999 employees.
Of those surveyed, 91 percent reported user-expectations were rising rapidly, 52 percent felt meeting service levels demanded by the organisation was becoming difficult while 39 percent said improving services levels was one of the top challenges of the day.
Identifying key objectives for the year, reducing costs came first followed by improving service levels and improving responsiveness.
Initiatives being pursued were to “do more with less”, include automation of routine tasks (mentioned by 70 percent of respondents), reduce data centre complexity (75 percent), and cut cost (80 percent).
Staffing in Indian data centres remained crucial with 41 percent reporting that they were understaffed while seven percent reported being overstaffed.
Fifty-two percent said finding qualified applicants was difficult, while 75 percent respondents felt that skills of data centre employees did not match the needs of their position. Sixty-one percent said retaining data centres employees was a big problem.
To address this, companies are leaning on outsourcing and training. Thirty-three percent of surveyed companies said they had outsourced work and the driver for outsourcing was to increase the staffs’ access to specialised skills.
Training is seen as strategic by 77 percent of the respondents, with 91 percent expecting training budgets to rise or stay constant over the next two years.
In 2008, companies reported that their data centre servers were operating at 53 percent of capacity.
Data centre storage utilisation was reported at 54 percent. The major server-related initiatives include server consolidation (45 percent) and server virtualisation (45 percent). For storage, initiatives were storage virtualisation (36 percent), continuous data protection (34 percent) and storage resource management (41 percent). Half of the surveyed companies said they were considering implementing data de-duplication in data centres.
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