Symantec: Data Centers Do More With Less in 2008

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Symantec and Applied Research recently polled 644 enterprises in the Americas for the annual State of the Data Center report and some interesting trends have emerged. Each of the businesses had 5,000 or more employees and roughly 30 to 49 data centers supporting their operations.

Marty Ward, senior director of data protection product marketing for Symantec, informs that in its second year, the report reveals that IT staffs are feeling the pressure to deliver the goods under ever-tightening constraints.

The study, he says, confirms that the new mantra among CIO's and IT managers today is "doing more with less."

Containing costs

In 2008, 37 percent of respondents identified reducing costs as key objective. Improving service levels came in a distant second at 18 percent.

Highlighting the struggle to deliver IT services under these conditions, 47 percent said that it had become more difficult or costly to meet service levels in 2008, slightly down from the 50 percent that answered in the same way in 2007. Zero percent of participants checked off the "much easier" box.

The results mirror the constant budget battles between IT and other business groups, says Ward. "People always invest in the business units and IT has to figure a way to support all of them," he states.

Yet the demands on IT keep growing. Operational units "keep asking for faster recovery times," for instance, among other technology services that consume no small amount of resources, personnel and money. "The bar gets raised every year," he states.

IT departments are taking a number of cost-cutting measures. Primarily, they are increasing automation of routine tasks (42 percent); cross-training IT staff (40 percent); reducing data center complexity (35 percent); and engaging in server virtualization/server consolidation (31 percent).

Strangely, improving efficiency, not impending budget cuts appear to motivate these managers.

The survey was conducted at the height of the economic meltdown, says Ward. Despite this, IT budgets aren't expected to implode as many had feared. Over the next 12 months, 50 percent expect budgets to increase while 34 percent expect them to remain the same. Only 16 percent expect smaller budgets.

Servers, storage and disaster recovery

Server utilization rates dropped to 53 percent from 65 percent the in 2007. Nonetheless, the report finds those figures do not signal a retreat from initiatives to boost utilization. Server consolidation is being pursued by 4 out of 5 respondents with 31 percent currently in the trial and implementation stage.

Virtualization, on the other hand, is a bit of mixed bag.

Some of the initial excitement appears to have worn off as organizations run into roadblocks. Of those polled, 47 percent felt that virtual server solutions have room to mature or were too new, a dramatic increase over the 29 percent that subscribed to that thinking in 2007. Indeed, over a third, 37 percent, reported running into virtual server management problems.

On the storage front, median raw storage capacity figures have doubled to 200 TB from 100 TB from 2007. Yet, like servers, organizations are watching utilization rates creep down to 50 percent in 2008 from 60 percent in 2007.

Companies are struggling with disaster recovery as well. Only 11 percent felt comfortable giving their disaster recovery strategy an excellent score; 32 percent rated it as average. Distressingly, 9 percent rated theirs as informal or nonexistent.

People, not fickle technology or the forces of nature, are the leading cause of downtime. Respondents attributed human error or change as the leading cause of data center downtime at 25 percent followed by hardware and software failures at 21 and 20 percent respectively.

Help wanted

In 2008, organizations found it tougher to fill IT positions, with 36 reporting that they were understaffed (a mere 1 percent reported to being "extremely overstaffed"). Indeed, 43 percent described finding qualified workers as a "big or huge problem."

The situation contributes, in part, to the cross-training figure earlier. Training budgets are expected to remain where they are or even rise in the next two years according to 78 percent of those polled.

Outsourcing is picking up the rest of the slack, with 45 percent handing off some activities, primarily to allow staffers to focus on other tasks, according to 43 percent of those polled. Interestingly, Ward reports, 65 percent of foreign firms outsource, showing a greater level of acceptance overseas.