Data Centre Consolidation Main Priority For 2011

The technology refresh has been cited as the top data centre priority for 2011 according to a new survey.

Fifty-one percent of data centre managers and decision makers at large organisations highlighted the technology refresh as their main concern, in a survey from IT infrastructure specialist SANpulse.

This finding highlights the fact that mean time to migrate (MTTM) is critical for rapid adoption of new technologies and fast execution of these operations.

Data Centre Consolidation

Next in importance is data centre consolidation, which 41.5 percent of respondents indicated is a top concern.

Thirty-four percent of respondents indicated the intent to migrate to a public or private cloud, while 32.7 percent expected to transition to a virtualised storage area network (SAN) and 26.5 percent said that SAN optimisation or retiering is a priority.

Twenty-one percent cited diversification of storage hardware as a top priority.

The survey also asked participants to rank which projects on their 2011 IT road map are expected to be the most challenging and difficult to deal with.

Thirty-nine percent responded that multidepartmental co-ordination is a top concern. Thirty-five percent said server remediation, SAN configuration errors, asset discovery and multidepartmental co-ordination are all challenging issues.

On the topic of SAN migrations and whether or not these activities were completed in a timely manner and met budgetary requirements, 41.5 percent of the respondents said that only 0 to 20 percent of their migrations were completed on time and on budget. Sixty-two percent said that 40 percent or fewer migrations completed on time and within budget. Finally, 79 percent have had less than 60 percent of their migrations meet their budgetary/time requirements.

No Data Recession

“These results echo what is routinely heard from IT professionals who face these recurring challenges,” said Greg Schulz, founder of the Server and StorageIO Group. “There is no such thing as a data or information recession. This means that as IT budgets for some expand, those organizations also need to do more with what they have, including support growth and technology refreshes in 2011.”

Schulz also noted that IT organisations focus much of their staff as well as wall or calendar time on data migrations to support technology refreshes and upgrades along with consolidation initiatives.

“With the complexities associated with large-scale migration or technology updates, not to mention multidepartmental workflow coordination, IT organisations stand to recover these resources by reducing their mean time to migrate,” he said. “Many large IT organisations have already implemented phased refresh schedules where each year a portion of their technology gets refreshed. However, budgets or spending remain constrained.”