SYMANTEC Corp last week released the findings of a study which indicates that information technology (IT) professionals worldwide are struggling with a double whammy of having to manage increasingly complex data centres while at the same time facing severe budget and personnel constraints.
Speaking to BizIT, Symantec's senior vice-president for Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ), Bill Robbins, said survey respondents had revealed that they were relying on several different technologies and initiatives in order to ease management challenges. These included storage capacity management, virtualisation and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) frameworks.
ITIL is a comprehensive and publicly available set of guidelines for 'best practice' IT services management, and is owned by the British Office of Government Commerce (OGC). Each library module provides a code of practice intended to improve IT efficiencies, reduce risks and increase the effectiveness and quality of IT services management and infrastructure.
The survey was conducted by Symantec in April this year and 500 IT professionals worldwide from large companies were interviewed. The respondents included professionals from North America, EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and APJ. In the APJ region, IT professionals from Singapore, China, Japan, Australia and Korea participated.
Mr Robbins pointed out that today's data centres are under intense pressure and the pressure is getting worse. 'If data centres are to meet the growing expectations placed on them for comprehensive protection and availability of their key applications, while dealing with the unfortunate reality of shrinking budgets, they need to regain control and stem the growing tide of disparate systems and tools that don't work together,' Mr Robbins noted.
The survey shows that 49 per cent of the respondents in the APJ region want to consolidate the tools and solutions that are already in use in data centres. A total of 69 per cent of those surveyed cited an increase in the number of management tools as at least a somewhat if not significant challenge.
The average number of such application management tools sitting on servers in APJ was 7.52. Mr Robbins said this was lower than EMEA's 11.62 and North America's 8.45 respectively.
He added: 'When consolidating, cost, best functionality and an integrated platform were highlighted as key considerations by the respondents in APJ.'
However, another interesting point brought out by the survey, and highlighted by Mr Robbins, was that APJ was less likely than North America or EMEA to implement server consolidation and capacity management. '31 per cent of people in APJ have no interest in implementing consolidation as compared to 14 per cent and 16 per cent in EMEA and North America respectively,' Mr Robbins noted.
Also, 63 per cent of APJ respondents cite cost as the major consideration when consolidating, compared to 40 per cent in EMEA and 43 per cent in North America.
The survey results show that IT professionals across APJ employ multiple approaches to tackle data centre complexity, Mr Robbins noted.
Giving some examples, he said that 70 per cent of respondents in APJ plan to implement or are already implementing virtual server (virtualisation) management technologies. Also, 53 per cent of respondents indicated that they are either discussing or currently implementing business continuity and disaster recovery processes for future data centre management initiatives.
Also, 53 per cent of the APJ respondents indicated that they are either discussing or currently managing and maintaining application availability for future data centre management initiatives.
The survey also shows that 50 per cent of the respondents worldwide feel human error as contributing significantly to unplanned downtime in data centres. The other major causes listed are application error and hardware failure.
All the APJ respondents who took part in the survey have said that they will have implemented ITIL or ITSM programmes by the end of this year.
Like ITIL, ITSM, or IT Service Management, is a discipline for managing large-scale IT systems, centred on the customer's perspective of IT's contribution to the business. Unlike ITIL, ITSM is a less technology-oriented approach to data centre management.
