Nearly eight out of 10 businesses are centralising IT
delivery into datacentres in a bid to increase efficiency and cut
costs, new research has shown.
A survey of 100 senior IT executives and chief information
officers from across the finance, manufacturing and retail
industries, and the public sector found that a quarter had already
centralised IT delivery, with another 63% in the processes of
moving or planning to do so.
Just 12% had no intention of centralising, the survey
commissioned by Computacenter Services and carried out by PMP
Research, found.
The research also highlighted moves by some businesses to shift
processing power from the desktop and consolidate application
delivery at the datacentre. The survey found 17% of companies had
already cut desktop processing power, with a further 11% planning
to do so and 18% evaluating the option.
But Terry Walby, datacentre solutions director at Computacenter
Services, warned that centralisation was putting huge pressure on
power supplies and physical space in the datacentre.
"For many businesses, environmental constraints are limiting
their ability to grow, so it is a critical situation,” he said.
“They can’t necessarily take advantage of technical advances
because they haven’t got the capacity or the delivery of power to
support it.”
He said, “There is no doubt that centralisation and
consolidation delivers cost benefits, particularly operational cost
benefits. But it requires a different level of consideration about
not just the technology but the environment as well.”
Concern about increased pressure on datacentre space and power
supplies was driving greater interest in options such as
virtualisation to improve utilisation of datacentres – which could
be as low as 5-15% of capacity, Walby said.
The survey showed that 62% of organisations saw virtualisation
as a significant technology. Over a quarter of companies (26%) had
already implemented server virtualisation with a further 16%
planning to do so and 16% in the evaluation stage.
Server virtualisation “has moved very much into the mass
market”, while storage virtualisation was also being taken more
seriously. “We see that as a continuing trend,” Walby said.
He urged businesses to use technology to reduce the demand on
datacentres, and to consider new methods of service delivery, such
as outsourcing workloads or using shared capacity in a hosted
datacentre.
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