Incompatible demands strain datacenter managers
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 11 February 2009, 21:36 IST   |    2 Comments
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Pune: Datacenter managers are caught between the growing consumer demands and the pressure of the pessimist economy. The servers and storage systems remain underutilized and the disaster recovery plans require constant fine-tuning and upgrade as companies find that hardware and software failures are the biggest causes of unplanned downtime. The findings based on the State of the Data Center Report 2008, found that the cost benefits is a basic cause behind the increasing pursuance for green data centers initiatives. The report is made on the backdrop of a survey conducted in September and October by Applied Research. The study targeted 50 companies from India, ranging from 5,000 to more than 50,000 employees, with the median company having between 10,000 and 19,999 employees. In the survey while the majority of those surveyed, which is 91 percent has agreed that user-expectations are rising rapidly. Meanwhile, 52 percent felt meeting service levels demanded by the organization was becoming difficult while 39 percent said improving services levels was one of the top challenges of the day. Initiatives being pursued were to 'do more with less', include automation of routine tasks, reduce data center complexity, and cut cost (80 percent). As a result, major server-related initiatives sprung which include server consolidation and server virtualization. For storage, initiatives were storage virtualization, continuous data protection and storage resource management. Half of the surveyed companies said they were considering implementing data de-duplication in data centers. Apart from the storage and servers, the most prominent hurdle that the datacenters face is staffing. While 41 percent maintained that they are understaffed due to the lack of qualified applicants, seven percent reported overstaffed, as the skills of the employees did not match the needs of their position.