Survey finds data centres feeling the crunch

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Financial, capacity and staffing pressures are being felt in data centres across the world, according to research.

Symantec’s State of the Data Centre Report for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Eastern Europe - which surveyed some 1,600 companies - revealed that, in line with the global economic slowdown, data centres are looking to find ways to do much more with less.

Surprisingly though, this year’s survey actually discovered data centre budgets had increased. Half of UK respondents said that their budgets had risen over the past 12 months.

The timing of the survey – during September to October 2008 – before the global financial meltdown hit its peak, may have affected findings, according to Darren Thomson, chief technology officer for data centre management at Symantec in EMEA.

He added: “Even Gartner is predicting that IT budgets will increase only between zero and half a per cent this year, where they have historically risen by three to four per cent annually. So even those with modest budget increases still need to do more less.”

Three quarters of those surveyed saw meeting the service levels demanded by the business as more becoming increasingly difficult to meet. Reducing costs emerged as the top concern, followed by the next two important criteria combined, which were improving responsiveness and service levels.

The initiatives cited most frequently to fight costs were increasing the automation of routine tasks; cross-training of IT staff; and server virtualisation or consolidation projects.

“If CAPEX [capital expenditure] budgets are being hit hard, but OPEX [operational expenditure] levels are going largely untouched, then we’re seeing data centre investment focused on technology that is going help reduce operational expenditure even more next year,” added Thomson. “But vendors will have to work much harder to prove a return on that investment.”

Alongside server virtualisation, tiered storage architectures emerged as a key technology enabler from the survey. Nearly 40 per cent said enterprise application software was increasing demand for data centre capacity, while business intelligence software and web applications were cited by 34 per cent each.

Thomson said this was why previously “nice to have” technologies, like server or storage virtualisation and data centre automation software would become “must-haves” in increasingly cost-conscious times.

Staffing also remained a big issue for data centres in the research. Over a third reported being understaffed, while almost half (45 per cent) said that finding qualified applicants was a big problem. This would further drive demand for automation tools as well as outsourcing, added Thomson.

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