The State of Today’s Data Center: Challenges and Opportunities

Data center managers are caught between a rock and a hard place. They are expected to do more than ever—including protecting rapidly expanding volumes of data and a growing number of mission-critical applications, managing highly complex and wildly heterogeneous environments, meeting more challenging service level agreements (SLAs), and implementing a variety of emerging "green" business initiatives.

And, they are expected to do it with less than ever—including fewer qualified staff and less-than-robust budgets. In fact, according to the 2008 State of the Data Center survey conducted by Applied Research, reducing costs is by far the highest key objective of data center managers today, followed by improving service levels and improving responsiveness. In other words, IT organizations are indeed laboring to do more with less.

The good news? A growing number of creative data center managers are using a variety of cost-containment strategies that capitalize on heterogeneity to increase IT efficiency and maximize existing resources while keeping costs under control. At the foundation of these solutions is a single layer of infrastructure software that supports all major applications, databases, processors, and storage and server hardware platforms.

By leveraging various technologies and processes across this infrastructure, IT organizations can better protect information and applications, enhance data center service levels, improve storage and server utilization, manage physical and virtual environments, and drive down capital and operational costs.

Increasing IT Efficiency
In IT organizations around the world, staffing remains a challenge. According to the State of the Data Center report, 38 percent of organizations are understaffed while only four percent are overstaffed. Moreover, 43 percent of organizations report that finding qualified applications is a very big issue—a problem that is exacerbated when dealing with multiple data centers.

While 45 percent of organizations respond by outsourcing some IT tasks, a number of equally effective alternatives are also available. The most common of these strategies, used by 42 percent of organizations, is to increase automation of routine tasks. This not only reduces costs but also frees IT to address more strategic initiatives.

Storage Management
A growing number of heterogeneous storage management tools automate daily and repetitive storage tasks, including RAID reconfiguration, defragmentation, file system resizing, and volume resizing.

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