Riverbed Technology, the application performance company, commissioned a market research survey which revealed that 70% of IT decision makers are looking to centralise applications during 2013.
The survey questioned 400 CIOs in Europe and the Middle East about their spending priorities this year.
In the UK, 50% of those surveyed indicated that server virtualisation was a primary concern for investment, with 46% citing storage consolidation as a priority. Additionally, 42% reported data centre consolidation as a priority, making these three areas the most common CIO spending priorities for 2013.
70% of UK CIOs planning a consolidation project reported the need to reduce the cost of managing distributed servers at the branch office layer as the key driver for their programmes. Other reasons provided for undertaking consolidation projects included data security and a desire for greater control of application and server upgrades.
Risto Wieland, director of IT at Swiss Re explained why they embarked upon a consolidation project: "We needed to simplify our network management by consolidating applications back to the data centre and removing as many servers as possible. We chose to implement a wide area network (WAN) optimisation solution from Riverbed to ensure application performance. As a result we have removed hundreds of servers from our regional data centres and remote offices, and consolidated 95% of all applications to the two Zurich data centres. This has reduced the amount of time spent on network management which is a huge benefit and both local backups and backups over the WAN are now no longer necessary."
The study also revealed in the UK that the biggest barrier to embarking on a virtualisation/consolidation project was the cost of initial set-up, with 53% of those not undertaking a project citing this reason. Complexity as well as application performance over the WAN were also reported as concerns by 51% and 45% respectively.
