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November 8, 2007 | |
Symantec's State of the Data Center Research report has revealed that data center managers are implementing virtualization and server consolidation strategies to manage the data center growing complexities, but also face onerous and complicated challenges resulting from rapidly rising Service Level Agreements (SLAs), staffing difficulties, increasing expenditures and data center growth. The research report suggested that one of the primary challenges for data center managers was stringent internal SLAs, which meant that data centers must deliver ever-increasing levels of speed, agility and availability when budgets are not growing to keep pace. The report interviewed 800 data center managers in Global 2000 and large public sector institutions around the world, including Canada and the United States. It found that 65 percent of respondents reported formal internal SLAs existed in their organization, but a little over a half reported they've had more difficulty meeting service-level demands during the past two-year period. "A lot of organizations are having a difficult time meeting service levels they've agreed to [because] of the complexity, heterogeneity and staffing challenges they are seeing within the data center," said Sean Derrington, director of storage management with Symantec. In fact, 52 percent of respondents reported that their data centers were currently understaffed. Respondents added that data center staffing challenges were pervasive among respondents. Eighty-six percent said that they had difficulty finding qualified applicants; 68 percent added that staffing was challenging because data centers were too complex to manage, and 57 percent indicated that employees' skills did not match their current needs. Symantec's report also noted that those interviewed said that they will be spending more than $6.6 billion US annually to help manage data center complexity, such as buying separate management software for each of an organizations heterogeneous data protection, storage and server management platforms. "If an organization undertakes an approach where they can standardize on a software infrastructure that is going to deliver data protection, storage and server management using [software like] Veritas Data Center Software, they are going to have additional IT budget to spend on business differentiation, new business applications and competitive advantages that they would otherwise be spending on complexity as opposed to value," said Derrington. The Veritas Data Center Software is a collection of software that includes Veritas Net Backup, Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Command Central Storage, Veritas Cluster Server and Veritas Server Foundation that standardizes data protection, storage management and server management, runs on every hardware platform, every major server operating system, processors, storage sub systems and tape library. Additionally, data center budget growth has been minimal during the past five years, and the average reported budget increased during the last two-year period at a modest seven percent worldwide. Unfortunately, Derrington said that many organizations couldn't support the growing complexity of the data center and view IT as a cost center than a profit center. "This is a challenge for data centre managers. With storage capacity growing 50-60 percent a year and with storage hardware prices only coming down 30-40 percent per year, something has got to change unless organizations are willing to spend more and more on storage hardware every year -- [Organizations] need to figure out a way to standardize and automate storage management by creating a software infrastructure that will allow them to take advantage of tiered storage, and take 10-15 percent out of their storage budget by increasing storage utilization." Server virtualization and consolidation were considered top cost containment strategies for the majority of respondents, particularly in the United States. According to the research results, 90 percent of respondents were at least discussing server virtualization, 50 percent implementing virtualization strategies, 91 percent at least discussing server consolidation, and 58 percent implementing consolidation strategies. As well, 75 percent of respondents were considering storage virtualization as a potential solution. Derrington stressed that companies need to standardize on a single layer of infrastructure software that supports all major applications, databases, processors and storage and server hardware platforms, to protect their information and applications, improve storage and server utilization, consistently manage physical and virtual environments and drive down operational cost. Creating a software infrastructure also addresses the issue of meeting SLAs and staffing challenges of data center managers. "[With a software infrastructure,] you can train staff once, yet have the ability and business flexibility to choose the underlying platform, without compromising how their staff is managing those service levels," said Derrington.
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