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Corporate data, applications continue to grow

Tony Chan | January 19, 2009 | 0 Comments

I recently reported on some research by Symantec, who published its second annual State of the Data Centre Report last week.

There were few surprises from the research. Basically, data centres will continue to get busier, but operations managers will have to do more with probably less resources than what they have today. You can read the full article on the CommsDay website here.

What was very interesting from the survey of 1,600 companies from Asia, Europe and the Americas, is the sheer amount of data and applications that are found inside corporate infrastructure these days.

For example, the average amount of data on the corporations surveyed was a whopping 128 terabytes. If you take that and multiple that by the number of companies the researchers talked to, the figure goes up to 204 petabytes, an astounding amount given the fact that all that data needs to be stored, managed, made accessible, secured and so on.

At the same time, the report also asked the corporations to disclose the number of applications that each are running on their networks. 14% of the respondents said their organizations are running more than 2000 applications. Another 27% are running between 1000-2000 applications while 42% have between 200-1000 applications. Only 17% are running less than 200 applications on their networks.

More importantly, the respondents say (on average) that 45% of the applications are ‘mission critical.’ At the same time, about half of the respondents expect to add more, or refresh application in the coming year.

The most obvious conclusion from the result is that there’s a lot of infrastructure out there to be optimized inside the data centre.

In this respect, the respondents do not disappoint. 87% say they are pursuing some form of server consolidation with about 50% in the discussion/planning stages and 40% in trials or implementing initiatives. About the same number of respondents are looking into server virtualization.

One interesting fact that the report found was that 47% of the respondents who said they were not getting into virtualization, said they were not doing so because existing solutions are ‘too new and immature,’ up from 31% a year earlier.

The respondents are also looking closely at optimizing their storage with four out of five saying they are exploring storage virtualization.

There are clearly huge opportunities for vendors who can help data centre managers address these requirements for optimizing their IT infrastructure.

On the topic of creating ‘green’ data centres, the respondents were overwhelmingly concerned over costs, with 49% of the respondents saying their motivation is reducing electricity consumption and reducing cooling costs. What they planned to do in the next year is top by recycling obsolete hardware and components (28%), followed by reducing annual energy costs (26%), and powering the data centre with cleaner energy sources (23%).

Interestingly, the respondents were also asked to give their motivations for creating a green data centre.