Users want more from the data center but reducing cost is a goal

Findings from Symantec's State of the Data Center report

Doing more for less was the mantra of respondents to Symantec's second annual State of the Data Center report. A full 75% of respondents said that user expectations were gradually increasing, while 62% said meeting service-level agreements was getting more difficult.

The survey was conducted by Applied Research, which polled 1,600 companies worldwide and targeted companies with 5,000 or more employees consisting of managers, directors or vice presidents. The researchers spoke to data center staff in 644 companies. The median size company had between 10,000 and 19,999 employees.

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Reducing costs was the most frequently mentioned goal for this year. Among the ways to reduce costs were increased automation of routing tasks, IT staff cross-training and server virtualization/consolidation.

Organizations surveyed also indicated that finding staff will be a big issue in 2009. A full 36% said they were understaffed while 43% said finding qualified applicants is a big problem. To alleviate some of these problems, nearly half of the companies surveyed indicated that they outsource some tasks and lighten the load on existing staff.

Further, 7 of 10 said their IT budgets had risen in the past two years. Only 16% saw decreases. (It should be noted that half of this study was conducted prior to September 2008, before the economic downturn hit.)

A full 41% of the companies surveyed reported having more than 1,000 applications to support, with 50% of the applications being deemed mission-critical. The applications that took the most time and IT resources were Web applications, transaction-based and messaging applications.

Servers remained underutilized in 2008 - respondents reported 53% server utilization. Half of the companies found troubleshooting difficult and 89% indicated that they were trying to standardize server and storage management across one platform. Four-fifths were consolidating servers.

In storage, increasing utilization is also a focus. Companies have a median of 200TB of raw storage with 50% of it utilized. Web applications, enterprise applications and business intelligence are the applications driving storage growth.

Three quarters of the respondents are looking at storage virtualization, 46% are looking at storage resource management, and 72% are interested in implementing continuous data protection. Almost three-quarters of the respondents are looking at data deduplication and two-thirds are looking at replication.

Finally, two-thirds are exploring storage-as-a-service offerings.