Data growth is the biggest data centre hardware infrastructure challenge for large enterprises, according to a recent survey by Gartner.
Forty-seven percent of survey respondents ranked data growth in their top three challenges, followed by system performance and scalability at 37%, and network congestion and connectivity architecture at 36%.
Sixty-two percent of respondents reported that they will be investing in data archiving or retirement by the end of 2011 to address the data growth challenge.
The Gartner survey was conducted with representatives from 1,004 large enterprises from eight countries.
Gartner research director April Adams said that while survey respondents reported that their top challenge with respect to their data centre infrastructure was data growth, they did not rank ‘existing data centre at or nearing capacity and/or utilisation limits’ as one of their top drivers for strategic change in the data centre.
"Rather, when we asked respondents what the three most important drivers of strategic change in their organisation’s data centre would be through the end of 2011, business continuity and availability came in first, with 50% of respondents," Adams said.
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Gartner principal research analyst Naveen Mishra said that the second and third most commonly mentioned drivers were cost containment initiatives — with 37% of respondents — and maintaining or improving user service levels and satisfaction — with 36% of respondents.
He said that technology providers that tie their messaging to one of these drivers, or a combination of these drivers, are likely to see their messages resonating with large-enterprise users.
According to the report, more than half of the survey respondents plan to expand capacity at their existing data centre site by the end of 2011, and 30% plan to build new data centres, although there is wide variance by respondent country.
The top three technologies that respondents plan to invest in through 2011 are server virtualisation (67%), application consolidation or rationalisation (56%) and blade servers (51%).
