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Staffing costs for data centres operated by large European organisations are predicted to rise by 10%, despite the recent financial turmoil. But research house IDC has warned that CIOs are still not implementing optimum data centre management practices.
Of the 300 corporations surveyed across the UK, France, and Germany for IDC's 2010 data centre survey, a quarter (25%) admitted that they are still managing their servers and storage manually. This of course pushes up running costs compared to companies that utilise some type of management tool.
The IDC survey of large and medium-sized organisations also revealed another shocking stat, with only 14% of organisations admitting they had a fully integrated management framework.
'Data centre management is still a massive issue for organisations,' said Jon Gasparini, Principal Consultant at IT services provider Morse, commenting on IDC's findings. 'Firstly, they continue to grow rapidly; and secondly, the technology within the data centre is growing ever more complex,' he said.
Need for prioritisation
'Although it's not surprising to see that only 14% of organisations have an integrated management framework, it's definitely something that needs addressing,' said Gasparini. 'By bringing together the different silos of management and automating their tasks through the technology stack organisations can reap massive cost savings.'
Morse's Gasparini feels that while undertaking an enterprise-wide automation project can be daunting and time consuming, companies should realise that it doesn't have to be all or nothing, and that it is often preferable to take a step-by-step approach to data centre automation.
'Companies should be deciding the management tasks that are the biggest drain on their time and looking to automate these first,' Gasparini said. 'By doing this they'll be able to pay back the cost of automation within months.'
'Data centre management is not being ignored, but it is not been given the priority it should,' Chris Ingle, IDC's Associate Vice President (Consulting) told DatacenterDynamics. 'Two reasons - the costs are not always explicit, we had to do a lot of work to get this data. Secondly, it's complex and dealing with that complexity is an enormous challenge.' The IDC research also revealed that only 30% companies saw data centre operational cost as a priority, with 25% concerned specifically about software licence costs.
Virtualisation push
And it seems that virtualisaton is being blamed for changing the nature of data centre management and increasing the data centre management burden. Overall, the prime management concern is the ability to integrate server, storage and network management (31% of respondents). According to IDC, larger data centres are more concerned with unifying their physical and virtual management, whereas smaller sites believe it is essential to integrate different virtualisation technologies into a single management strategy.
IDC found that 52% of organisations are relying on their visualisation provider to help them with virtualisation management, and 32% are actually using their systems vendor to manage their virtual environment. Only 16% are casting their eyes at suppliers of management suites.
'Virtualisation is interesting now as it forms a larger chunk of investment in the data centre,' said IDC's Ingle. 'What virtualisation is doing in respect of management though is adding another layer to manage and hence adding complexity.'
VMware management specialist Veeam agrees, and believes that the rapid growth and uptake of virtualisation has increased the management burden that CIOs are facing.
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