Data Centre Managers In India Expected To 'Do More with Less'

Symantec Corp has released the India findings of its 2008 State of the Data Centre Report. The second annual study found that data centre managers are caught between two conflicting goals – more demanding user expectations and higher levels of performance, yet reducing costs remain the primary objective for the data centre.

The report also found that data centre staffing remains problematic; servers and storage continue to be underutilised and disaster recovery plans requires constant fine-tuning and upgradation. Finally, the respondents indicated that while they are pursuing green data centre initiatives, they are doing so primarily based on cost benefits.

"This research confirms what we are seeing in the field," said Anand Naik, director, Systems Engineering, Symantec Corporation. "Attention has turned to initiatives that will drive immediate cost reduction, rather than longer-term ROI-driven programmes."

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Growing Data Centre Complexity

As data centres use equipment from a variety of different storage and server hardware vendors, and these vendors provide discrete tools to manage their own platforms, data centres are getting more and more complex to manage. 75 percent respondents felt that managing data centres is becoming more and more complex. 70 percent felt that their data centres had too many applications to manage easily.

Doing More for Less

Of those surveyed, a staggering 91 percent reported user-expectations are rising rapidly. Furthermore, 52 percent of the respondents felt meeting the service levels demanded by the organisation was proving to be difficult. At the same time, 39 percent of respondents felt that improving services levels was by far one of the top challenges that they face today.

When asked to identify their key objectives for the year, reducing costs was by far the most frequently mentioned goal. In fact, reducing costs was mentioned by more companies than the next two objectives combined (improving service levels and improving responsiveness).

The key initiatives data centres are pursuing to 'do more with less' include automation of routine tasks (mentioned by 70 percent of respondents), reducing data centre complexity (75 percent), and reducing cost (80 percent).

Staffing Remains a Big Issue

According to the study, staffing in Indian data centres remains a crucial issue with 41 percent reporting that they are understaffed while only 7 percent reported being overstaffed. Furthermore, 52 percent say finding qualified applicants is a big or huge problem. In addition, 75 percent respondents felt that skills of data centre employees did not match the needs of their position. 61 percent also cited that retaining data centre employees was a big problem.

To address the staffing issue, companies are leaning on outsourcing and training. 33 percent of companies said they have outsourced their work and the primary driver for outsourcing is to increase the staff's access to specialised skills. Training is seen as strategic by 77 percent of the respondents, with 91 percent expecting training budgets to rise or stay constant over the next two years.

Servers and Storage Remain Underutilised

Companies in 2008 reported that their data centre servers were operating at just 53 percent of capacity. Data centre storage utilisation was reported at 54 percent. Not surprisingly, the report found a flurry of activity aimed at increasing utilisation in both areas.

The major server-related initiatives include server consolidation (45 percent) and server virtualisation (45 percent). For storage, the leading initiatives were storage virtualisation (36 percent), continuous data protection (34 percent) and storage resource management (41 percent). 50 percent companies said that they were considering implementing data de-duplication in the data centre.

Disaster Recovery Lags Behind

Data centre management continues to report room for improvement in the area of disaster recovery. In fact, 55 percent report that their disaster recovery plan is average or needs work. 18 percent report their plan is informal or undocumented. Companies still find that hardware and software failure are the biggest causes of unplanned downtime, human error and natural disasters follow closely behind.

Green Data Centre driven by Cost

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. The study asked companies why creating a green data centre was important to their workplace. Reducing electricity consumption was mentioned by 54 percent, followed by reducing cooling costs (51 percent) and a sense of responsibility to the community (42 percent).

Report Underscores Need for Solutions

This year's study shows the continuing importance for companies to control data centre complexity and costs. With the mandate to literally do more with less, companies are scrambling to find solutions that have an immediate effect on cost and efficiency.

"IT managers and executives are in a tough spot," said Naik. "Cost reduction is a non-negotiable objective this year, while user expectations remain high and demand continues to rise. We are seeing this translate into interest in solutions that provide customers with confidence and deliver immediate benefits in reducing server and storage spend without disrupting today's environment."