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Symantec State of the Data Center Report 2007

Source:
Storage Resource Management / ILM
Published:
Apr 14, 2009
Pages:
33

Today's data centers are becoming more complex and are likely to become even more so in the next five years. Increasingly, businesses are demanding higher application availability and the rapid integration of new technologies. At the same time, the amount of data generated by data center applications is exploding and much of it must be protected, as per new privacy and government regulations, and retained for longer periods of time.

Welcome to the life of data center managers. They are being asked to do more with relatively modest budget increases. Qualified staff is harder to find. And the business side of the organization is asking that applications be deployed in much faster timeframes.

The purpose of this study is to gauge the true state of today's data center, including the issues data center managers face and how they are dealing with them.

The study found that roughly two-thirds of data center managers said their data centers are becoming too complex to manage easily. If dealing with this complexity was not enough, more than half of the data center managers surveyed said internal service-level-agreement (SLA) demands are increasing.

Simply throwing bodies at the problem is not the solution. The majority of managers said it is getting harder to find qualified staff. And more than half of the managers said their data centers are understaffed.

In addition, budgets are relatively flat or show only modest gains.

As a result, companies are turning to cost containment technologies, such as server consolidation, virtualization, storage resource management, unified server and storage management, and data lifecycle management. At the same time, they are implementing approaches to simplify operations, including automating routine tasks, relying on standards, or standardizing on fewer vendors. Others are turning to outsourcing.

Still there is a realization that these approaches can only do so much. There is also dissatisfaction with current solutions. In fact, many managers today are intentionally using limited solutions that do a great job in one particular area, at the expense of others. For example, many rely on the software provided by their storage device manufacturer for data management. The problem is that such software does not support any other equipment in the data center, not even storage devices from other manufacturers.

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