Brief

State of the Data Center

A study entitled Symantec State of the Data Center undertaken in Sept 2007 by Ziff Davis Enterprise, on behalf of Symantec Corp. encompassed 800 data center managers across 14 countries. It ascertained the complexities and challenges faced by data center managers, the rise of issues concerning them and strategies and methods to encounter these. The interviews conducted through teleconferences, online, and one-on-one interactions, included 10 participants from Mumbai as well.

Sriram Iyer, Director, Enterprise Sales, Finance Programs, Asia Pacific and Japan, Symantec, explained, “The budget for maintaining IT infrastructure is flat and with the costs increasing, so is the volume of data which is exploding. With a change in the definition of mission-critical applications, technology has to be resilient to support the business, and is expected to make information available and retrievable at all times. Therefore, ‘Think strategically, act tactically’ is the maxim that needs to adhered to.” He categorized the challenges into four broad slots—cost, SLA, staffing and complexity, and viewed consolidation and automation as the possible solutions.

Since the cost in APJ data centers are bound to be on the rise, containment strategies like consolidation, virtualization and automation, and cross training of staff are being charted out. A substantial 28% of respondents felt that there was a rapid rise in the change of service levels demanded. Shortage of staff was a key concern , and specialization had become passé. The dearth of dexterous, cross-trained staff, having a broader set of knowledge base and varied skill sets, is a problem that needs to be dealt with. Training, and then losing the trained workforce is also a challenge. But, with flat budgets, and video-conferencing and voice-over IPS tools readily available, the reduction in headcount, will also lead to minimal errors as there will be a limited but effective work force for the tasks assigned. The survey revealed that there were gaps in the demand-supply level of specialists, analysts and administrators that needed to be met. 28% of the respondents said that people contributed to downtime. Automation of the workflow would also mean that people moved from the mundane tasks to more strategic, value-added jobs.

To tackle the complexities involved in running and maintaining a data center, and the confluence of applications, many of the APJ respondents felt that outsourcing could handle the situation. The study showed that the most popular outsourced tasks in APJ were server maintenance, backups, IT service business-continuity, storage management, and storage virtualization—all significantly more than in other world regions.

Iyer also felt that, “Going green, i.e. power consumption will be a major issue that will creep up in the near future. We have to look at protecting our current investment, whilst keeping the organization completely flexible, developing and moving. There has to be a unified set of solutions that work towards providing a competitive edge. Marry the different systems together, and then give the best results. Data to be protected and servers to be managed with fine-tuning the performance in a heterogeneous environment makes it complex.”