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European CIOs expect datacenter management costs to rise
Friday, 12 March 2010, 18:20 IST
Bangalore: CIOs across Europe are not very keen on cutting costs and they expect their datacenter management staff spending to increase by ten percent in the coming year. IDC recently carried out a survey involving about three hundred datacenters of varying sizes and capacities across the length and breath of Europe and had some interesting findings to report, which have been summarized in their IDC European Datacenter Management Survey 2010.
According to IDC, there are different reasons cited for this factor, one of them being the traditional manual methods followed in their server and storage management. A limited percentage of the organizations follow a fully integrated management system. Since most of the CIOs surveyed projected their concerns with software licensing and other miscellaneous spending but did not place management cost savings at a much important point on their radars.
IDC believes that the industry needs to put in their efforts and try to educate these CIOs about the importance of savings in data center management costs by utilizing the latest technologies. This can be done in a number of ways like, catering to the needs of these organizations on a tailor made basis. Some of these organizations would prefer modular solutions to their datacenter management needs while others would want integrated solutions. Similarly the requirements also vary based on whether these organizations are huge in size or relatively smaller.
The program director at IDC also believes that it is a difficult task to try and convince the datacenter CIOs about spending funds to improve management. After all, the datacenter managers and executives have several other priorities than just improving management efficiency. For example they might be more worried about providing security and availability to the datacenter, which directly affects their business requirements.
Technologies such as virtualization and automation are two main focus areas which could help improve the current situation and help improvement in the EU datacenter scenario. The advantages of these technologies, especially virtualization are quite clear, but they are bit of a challenge when they have to be justified in terms of improvisation in datacenter management. Yet it is hoped that over a period of time, the benefits of these modern trends and technologies in datacenter technology would certainly be adopted by increasing number of organizations not only in the EU but the entire world and help to improve the overall efficiency of the datacenter world in general.
