Johannesburg, 27 Nov 2012
CA Southern Africa has announced the results of a study sponsored by CA Technologies in which more than 500 IT and facilities professionals at mid-sized and large organisations in North America, Western Europe and Latin America participated.
The IDC study, entitled "The Datacentre's Role in Delivering Business Innovation"*, reports that nearly 85% of organisations say that issues with data centre power, space and cooling capacity - as well as asset and uptime issues - resulted in delayed or aborted application rollouts, reduced ability to support customers, and unplanned reallocation of opex and capex budget away from strategic goals during the past year.
These issues reduce IT's ability to support business innovation and get maximum business value from IT hardware and software investments.
"Organisations are spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year on the infrastructure deployed in their data centres, and even more on power and cooling plus IT and facilities support staff to ensure that current and new applications are highly available," says Richard Villars, vice-president of Data Centre and Cloud at IDC and author of the study. "They must ensure this investment is being spent efficiently and effectively, and supporting the business' overall goals of delivering innovative new products and services."
Unfortunately, as the study reveals, data centre infrastructure issues are significantly undermining the business value returned by these investments. Specific issues cited by 84% of respondents whose data centre infrastructure is under-performing include power (27%), space (27%) and cooling (25%) - as well as imbalances in capacity across multiple sites.
The study revealed the most common reasons things go awry in the data centre. These include:
* Outdated data centres - 57% of respondents admit that their data centres are either "inefficient" or only "moderately efficient".
* Fragmented data centre operations - Because IT and facilities staff manage different aspects of data centre operations, organisations are not able to implement coherent processes, policies or metrics.
* Inconsistent data centre information - Without clear visibility into key data centre infrastructure metrics, decision-makers can't accurately plan capacity, proactively discover potential problems, or optimise allocation of resources such as power, cooling, network connectivity, rack and floor space.
The study highlights the fact that data centre management tools are often manual and fragmented. It suggests that a more unified approach to data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) can empower organisations to get more value from their existing data centre investments and better support IT-based business innovation.
"IT and facilities must work together to deliver the innovation that their C-level management is demanding," says Villars. "To help achieve this, organisations should look to implement a DCIM solution that takes a unified approach to management across all aspects of the data centre."
More than half of the data centre managers surveyed said there would be value in having an integrated DCIM solution. Respondents' priorities for a DCIM solution included:
* Real-time monitoring of power, temperature and other variables;
* Alerts and alarms for power and cooling;
* Inventory and asset management; and
* Capacity analysis and planning.
"Data centres present major challenges for organisations today, and these can have impacts on the business," says Hannes Lategan, solution strategist, CA Southern Africa. "Conventional approaches often make it difficult to monitor and manage data centre space, power, cooling and assets effectively. DCIM addresses these challenges and helps organisations to leverage data centre infrastructure for higher efficiency, reduced risk and the increased agility needed to address expanding business demands," concludes Lategan.
IDC's Villars, CA Technologies VP of DCIM business strategy Peter Gilbert, and Data Centre Dynamics CTO Stephen Worn will present the findings in a Webinar entitled "The Datacentre Dilemma: Optimise Capacity, Reduce Risk, Get Rapid Value. Can DCIM Deliver?" on Wednesday, 28 November 2012, at 11am ET. To register, please visit http://bit.ly/SqOTKt.
To download the study, visit www.ca.com/dcim-survey. For information on CA DCIM, visit http://www.ca.com/dcim.
* IDC White Paper sponsored by CA Technologies, "The Datacentre's Role in Delivering Business Innovation: Using DCIM to Provide a Common Management Approach", Doc # 237737, November 2012.
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