Data centre management busts budgets

Large European firms are expected to throw big money at data centre management this year, despite tightened purse strings, as they struggle to manage their infrastructure, reports Computer Business Review.

Spend on staff working on data centre management is expected to grow by 10%, according to research firm IDC, far outstripping budget rises in most IT departments, because of an over-reliance on manual intervention.

A quarter of organisations still manage their servers and storage manually, found IDC, while only 14% of organisations had a fully integrated management framework.

Data centre management practices in Europe need improvement, according to survey results from market research firm IDC, writes InformationManagement.

The survey report, 'IDC European data centre management survey 2010,' demonstrates that European companies are focused on the wrong areas of their data centre to achieve optimisation.

“Companies are still too focused on areas such as software licensing costs, but to get an optimised data centre they need to focus more on people, effectiveness and cost,” says Chris Ingle, associate vice-president of consulting at IDC.

Emerson Network Power has unveiled a data centre management package that combines all facility resources yet requires no new servers to run, states eWeek.

The company claims that Aperture IRM (Integrated Resource Manager), which is a result of Emerson's acquisition of Aperture in February 2008, is the industry's first data centre optimisation software that doesn't require a new server to run it.

Users can simply install the package on one of their existing machines while Aperture service personnel take care of the rest of the deployment.