Symantec, in the recently released India findings of its 2008
State of the Data Center Report has observed that data center
managers are caught between two conflicting goals – more
demanding user expectations and higher levels of performance, yet
reducing costs remain the primary objective for the data
center.
The findings also indicate that data center staffing remains a
major issue, servers and storage continue to be underutilized and
disaster recovery plans requires constant fine-tuning and updating.
Finally, the respondents indicated that while they are pursuing
green data center initiatives, they are doing so primarily based on
cost benefits.
“IT managers and executives are in a tough spot,”
said Anand Naik, director, Systems Engineering, Symantec.
“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.”
The findings saw that 75 % of the respondents felt that managing
data centers is becoming more complex and 70 % felt that their data
centers had too many applications to manage easily. The report
suggests that with data centers using equipment from a variety of
different storage and server hardware vendors, and these vendors in
turn providing their own unique and discrete tools to manage their
platforms, managing data center complexity has increased making
them more difficult to manage.
Of those surveyed, around 91 % respondents reported that
user-expectations are rising rapidly. Furthermore, while 52 % felt
meeting the service levels demanded by the organization was proving
to be difficult, 39 % of respondents felt that improving services
levels was by far one of the top challenges that they face today.
When asked to identify their key objectives for the year, reducing
costs, besides improving service levels and improving
responsiveness, was the most frequently mentioned goal.
The key initiatives data centers are pursuing to “do more
with less” include automation of routine tasks, mentioned by
70 % of respondents, reducing data center complexity, mentioned by
75 %, and reducing cost is what 80 % of respondents felt.
The survey also saw respondents feeling staffing in Indian data
centers to be a crucial issue with 41 % reporting that they are
understaffed while only 7 % reported being overstaffed.
Furthermore, 52 % said finding qualified applicants was a big
problem and 75 % respondents felt that skills of data center
employees did not match the needs of their position. 61 % of the
respondents also cited that retaining data center employees was a
big problem.
Respondents also reported that their data center servers were
operating at just 53 percent of capacity. Data center storage
utilization was reported at 54 percent. Also 55 % reported that
their disaster recovery plan is average or needs work and 18 % felt
that their plan is informal or undocumented. Hardware and software
failures were felt to be the biggest causes of unplanned downtime,
human error and natural disasters follow closely behind.
The report also observed that the data center’s focus on
“being green” was driven by cost issues in 2008 with
social responsibility on the rise. Reducing electricity consumption
was mentioned by 54 %, followed by reducing cooling costs, felt by
51 % and a sense of responsibility to the community is what 42 % of
the respondents mentioned.