Data center managers adopt virtualisation, server consolidation
ConvergenceAsia staff
16/11/2007

According to Symantec’s findings of its worldwide State of the Data Centre Research report, data centre managers are implementing virtualisation and server consolidation strategies to manage the growing complexities in today’s data centre.

Research results suggest the primary challenges for data centre managers are stringent internal service-level agreements (SLAs), ongoing data centre growth and staffing issues.

Findings indicate budget growth is not keeping pace with data centre growth, while stringent SLAs mean data centres must deliver ever-increasing levels of speed, agility and availability. According to research results:
- 65 per cent of respondents report formal internal SLAs exist in their organisation.
- 32 per cent report service-level demands have rapidly increased.
- 51 per cent report they’ve had more difficulty meeting service-level demands during the past two-year period.

To add to these challenges, data centre growth is persistent and expected to continue, driving enormous costs. Research shows that Global 2000 enterprises are spending more than US$6.6 billion annually to help manage data centre complexity. According to the research results:
- 52 per cent of respondents report their data centres are currently understaffed.
- 69 per cent of respondents reveal their data centres are growing at least 5 per cent per year, while 11 per cent report 20 per cent growth or more per year.
- The average reported budget increase during the last two-year period is a modest 7 per cent worldwide.

Server virtualisation and consolidation are considered top cost containment strategies for the majority of respondents, particularly in the United States. According to the research results:
- 90 per cent of respondents are at least discussing server virtualisation; 50 per cent are implementing virtualisation strategies.
- 91 per cent are at least discussing server consolidation; 58 per cent are implementing consolidation strategies.
- 75 per cent of respondents are considering storage virtualisation as a potential solution.
- 59 per cent of respondents indicate web applications are the most likely to be moved into a virtual environment, followed by database management applications, selected by 42 per cent of respondents.

Today’s data centres face a truly intimidating – and worsening – set of challenges involving SLAs, data growth, staffing challenges and cost, as revealed by our State of the Data Centre report, said Sriram Iyer, Director, Enterprise Sales Finance Programs, Asia Pacific & Japan, Symantec.

“The services delivered by data centre professionals have never been more important to their businesses, but at the same time, they are under relentless pressure to do more with less, and within an environment of maddening complexity. Data centre managers can transform their data centre and manage growing costs and complexity by standardising on a common software infrastructure - a powerful weapon in the arsenal of the respondents we surveyed,” he said.

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