The Hindu Business Line : ‘Data centre managers face conflicting goals’

Pune, Feb. 10 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 per cent reported user-expectations were rising rapidly, 52 per cent felt meeting service levels demanded by the organisation was becoming difficult while 39 per cent 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 per cent of respondents), reduce data centre complexity (75 per cent), and cut cost (80 per cent).

Staffing issues

Staffing in Indian data centres remained crucial with 41 per cent reporting that they were understaffed while seven per cent reported being overstaffed.

Fifty-two per cent said finding qualified applicants was difficult, while 75 per cent respondents felt that skills of data centre employees did not match the needs of their position. Sixty-one per cent said retaining data centres employees was a big problem.

To address this, companies are leaning on outsourcing and training. Thirty-three per cent 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 per cent of the respondents, with 91 per cent 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 per cent of capacity.

Data centre storage utilisation was reported at 54 per cent. The major server-related initiatives include server consolidation (45 per cent) and server virtualisation (45 per cent). For storage, initiatives were storage virtualisation (36 per cent), continuous data protection (34 per cent) and storage resource management (41 per cent). Half of the surveyed companies said they were considering implementing data de-duplication in data centres.

Data centre management continued to report room for improvement in disaster recovery. Fifty-five per cent reported that their disaster recovery plan is average or needs improvement, 18 per cent reported their plan is informal or undocumented. Companies still find that hardware and software failures are the biggest causes of unplanned downtime. Human error and natural disasters follow closely behind.

Continuing the trend first spotted in 2007, the data centre’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 per cent, followed by reducing cooling costs (51 per cent) and a sense of responsibility to the community (42 per cent).

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