Symantec worldwide study indicates data centres in crisis
Respondents polled revealed that to ease management challenges, they are relying on several different technologies and methods including storage capacity management, virtualisation and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) frameworks.
Survey responses indicate that the growing volume of servers, applications and operating systems in today’s data centres is contributing substantially to data centre complexity. Of the respondents surveyed, 85% cite an increase in the number of servers and applications as factors contributing to complexity in the data centre.
In addition, 80% of respondents cite an increase in the number of management tools employed and 72% pointed to an increase in the number of operating systems in their environment as causes for complexity in the data centre.
According to 75% of respondents, decreasing headcount is one of the biggest challenges in managing complex environments. In addition, 50% of respondents cite human error as contributing significantly to the cause of unplanned downtime in the data centre.
According to survey respondents, the leading causes of downtime in the data centre include application error, human error and hardware failure, signalling a need for a centralised and automated solution to aid with application availability.
According to 80% of respondents, an increase in the number of management tools is somewhat if not significantly challenging, signifying a need for consolidation and standardisation. With respondents using an average of nine server and application management tools, more than half of IT professionals indicated plans to consolidate the number of tools they are using. Key considerations for consolidation cited by respondents were best functionality or performance, cost, and an integrated platform.
Seeking to standardise processes to reduce complexity, 99% of respondents worldwide are implementing ITIL/ITSM frameworks to manage IT services. Of the respondents polled, 18% have already implemented ITIL, 52% indicate that it is an ongoing process, 22% will implement ITIL over the next year and 9% will implement ITIL over the next three years. All respondents say they will implement ITIL within the next three years. In contrast, respondents across Asia-Pacific indicate they will have implemented ITIL/ITSM over the next year.
In addition to ITIL, the IT professionals polled cited that they are also planning to implement or have implemented the following initiatives:
* storage allocation and resource management (according to 80% of respondents);
* virtual server management (according to 71% of respondents);
* storage capacity management (according to 68% of respondents);
* business continuity and disaster recovery (according to 60% of respondents);
* application availability (according to 57% of respondents).
“These findings demonstrate that IT professionals are seeking methods to simplify complicated management issues by streamlining and optimising existing resources in their data centres – objectives that can be accomplished by standardising on a common layer of software infrastructure across data centre environments,” says Patrick Evans, regional director of Symantec Africa.
To master data centre complexity, Symantec recommends that companies standardise on a single layer of software infrastructure across their entire data centre to reduce IT complexity, protect information and applications, improve manageability and control of cross-platform storage and server assets, and drive down operational cost.
By standardising on a common software infrastructure, enterprises will be able to replace dozens of different tools, enabling protection and availability of critical information and applications, improved utilisation of storage and server hardware assets, and enhanced visibility and control of complex data centre environments.
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