Data centre confusion threatens business

A new survey has found that organisations are not adequately documenting the physical, hardware layer of the data centre.

A lack of formal standards and configuration management of changes to space, power and cooling in the data centre has led more than half (54 per cent) of respondents to experience between one and five outages at the physical level.

In the study, the Aperture Research Institute (ARI) researched 100 data centre organisations across a range of industries including banking, government, insurance, healthcare, data services, retail, and telecommunications.

Of those, nearly half (49 per cent) admitted they are not able to track changes across physical aspects of their data centre, while almost two-thirds (62 per cent) thought that more than 10 per cent of their configuration information was incorrect.

Steve Yellen, Aperture Research Institute principal analyst, said the survey findings were all the more worrying because of the increasingly widespread use of high-density equipment in the data centre. As a result, the availability of power and cooling information in this environment was dictating its absolute limits on capacity.

"Without reliable configuration information, data centres are increasing the risk of power outages and bad capacity planning," he said.

The survey also found that organisations are not adequately documenting the physical layer of the data centre. Some 64 per cent struggled with the quality of configuration information, describing it as average to fair, with a further five per cent admitting configuration of information was poor.

Only 38 per cent of data centre managers believe their configuration information is over 90 per cent accurate; while as many as eight per cent confessed that they couldn't trust half of their configuration information.

The survey said slow implementation of management framework, Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is one reason for inaccurate data. When questioned, less than one third (29%) had implemented ITIL.

Data centre managers admitted to using between three to five different systems to store configuration information, making it difficult to aggregate information onto a single view. Only six per cent of data centre managers surveyed use a single system to document everything. And only 29 per cent of data centre managers surveyed said their organisations had ITIL initiatives in place.

Yellen added: "The disparity between IT and data centre facilities in implementing good ITIL practices has created a situation where high density equipment is not being managed to appropriate standards. If this continues the number of disruptions in service will increase and costs will continue to rise."

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