Complexity is the top concern for enterprise data centre managers due to increasing data costs and the worsening skills shortage.
Yesterday, Symantec released its 2010 State of the Data Centre study, based on surveys of 1 780 data centre managers in 26 countries.
The local skills shortage and lack of disaster recovery plans have been blamed as the primary reasons why large, medium-size and small enterprises fail to keep up with the rising demands of storage.
Enterprises are struggling to manage the growing number of applications. Adding to this complexity, according to Symantec, is the increase in data. This is causing 71% of organisations to consider data reduction technologies such as deduplication.
Sheldon Hand, Symantec storage specialist, explains that one-third of disaster recovery plans are undocumented. He adds that cloud computing, remote office, and virtual servers are often not included in disaster recovery plans.
“What is more worrying,” notes Hand, “is that only 80% of companies have confidence in their disaster recovery plans. Not many of them have made sure the information they give over to third parties hosting their information is compliant.”
Hand indicates one-third of enterprises haven't evaluated their disaster recovery plan in the past 12 months, because of the hassle and complexity involved.
Budget burdens
In addition, the security giant found staffing and budgets remain tight, with half of all enterprises reporting they are extremely understaffed. Finding budget and qualified applicants are the biggest recruiting issues for enterprises and 76% of enterprises have the same or more job demands open this year.
Medium-size enterprises ranging between 2 000 and 9 999 employees, are adopting emerging technologies such as cloud computing, deduplication, replication, storage virtualisation and continuous data protection at a 17% higher rate than small or large enterprises.
These enterprises also place a higher importance on staffing and training than their small or large enterprise counterparts.
“They also have a greater appetite for new technologies and have the budget to support it, but the smaller enterprises (up to 2 000 employees) face tighter budgets, and being able to deploy an effective disaster recovery plan is a challenge for them,” Hand notes.
Most enterprises have 10 or more data centre initiatives. However, 50% of enterprises expect to make significant changes to their data centres this year.
New solutions
“Security, backup, recovery and continuous data protection are the most important initiatives in 2010, ahead of virtualisation,” says Hand.
Some 83% of enterprises rated security as important and 79% claim backup and recovery is their top priority, while 76% rated continuous data protection as one of their top initiatives.
Symantec claims enterprises tend to purchase more storage when their current storage runs out but adds this is not the answer.
Hand explains an effective way of reducing complexity is by standardising on cross-platform solutions that can manage new technologies and automate processes.
The security company says data centre administrators need to manage storage across heterogeneous server and storage environments that leverage storage resource management, thin provisioning, deduplication, storage virtualisation and continuous data protection and recovery.
Organisations should also deploy a single, unified platform for physical and virtual machine protection to simplify information management to reduce complexity in the data centre.
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