Large European firms expect to throw big money at data centre management this year, despite tightened purse strings, as they struggle to manage their infrastructure.
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.
Inevitably, the rapid adoption of virtualisation has affected the data centre landscape and created many new challenges alongside the benefits of reduced costs and better resource management. Biggest worry, highlighted by IDC, was how to integrate server, storage and network management. Larger firms’ data centre folk were also worried about unifying their physical and virtual management. Half the organisations were using their virtualisation provider to manage their virtual environments.
Ratmir Timashev, president and CEO of VMware experts Veeam, said that these negative effects of virtualisation could easily be sorted out.
“The rush to virtualisation has caused added complexities that ultimately lead to increased inefficiency,” said Timashev. Excited by its potential, many businesses have used virtualisation across a broad spectrum of infrastructure with little thought on the impact this has on the data centre. Data centre teams are being swamped with reams of information with no idea of what it really represents or how critical it is.”
The next-generation, fully virtual data centres should help eliminate these inefficient processes, by ensuring that mission-critical applications were virtualised and more efficient instead of the current status quo where they reside on cumbersome physical severs.
By using the right tools and best practices, CIOs can reduce the need for additional personnel, growing and fine tuning their virtualisation-based data centres with relative ease,” said Timashev.
