Half of European companies do not know the usage levels of
their servers, according to research carried out by analyst group
Quocircia for Oracle.
The findings were revealed at the Oracleworld user conference in
Paris last week, where Tim Payne, Oracle's senior director for
technology, said, "Nearly a third of companies simply go out and
buy more hardware when a system encounters capacity problems."
If utilisation rates were pushed up to 90%, companies across Europe
would save £2.7bn a year in reduced server purchases, Payne said.
"Many companies are wasting money on extra server hardware when
they could be sharing unused capacity to overcome bottlenecks," he
said.
Quocircia talked to 307 IT professionals following Oracle's
September release of its 10g grid computing database.
Oracle used its European user conference to announce a cut-price
easy-to-install offer to SMEs for the 10g database.
Oracle will offer options to SMEs and company departments that will
allow them to install 10g from one CD in 17 minutes at a cost of
less than £3,500 per processor, or £115 per user.