An independent survey of IT Executives and IT managers
has revealed
datacentre power management and
virt
ualisation as firms’ top business alignment
priorities.
The survey by operations management firm
Avocent aimed to discover the
top challenges in aligning IT with business objectives. It showed
companies are seeking better visibility into their datacentre
operations to help mitigate business continuity challenges, better
manage virtualised systems and applications, and control power
consumption and overall complexity.
Energy conservation was the most difficult issue to resolve with
companies’ current tools with respondents regarding managing total
cost of power as the second most difficult task.
Just over half (55%) of companies measure power usage in their
datacentre, primarily at the UPS level and 83% consider the ability
to measure power consumption at the entire datacentre level as
“valuable” or “extremely valuable.”
A high number of respondents said they had begun to move toward
server virtualisation, mainly for its cost reductions and energy
savings promised. The top reason for
deploying virtual servers was cost savings. Nearly a third had
initially looked to
virtualisation as a means of decreasing hardware costs and a
similar figure implemented server virtualisation for energy-saving
goals.
Yet in assessing, virtualisation, companies expressed fears
about lost or failed virtual servers. Of those who had rolled out
some level of server virtualisation, nearly a quarter had
experienced a disappearance of a virtual server from their system
and nearly a fifth (18%) had lost a virtual server permanently.
Other key concerns related to managing server virtualisation
with 45% having concerns about the lack of expertise that IT
personnel had with virtualisation and 44% being concerned that
virtual servers could fail from a component failure in a single
physical server.
“Our survey confirms that businesses are indeed challenged most
by the need to effectively manage the increased complexity in
today’s datacentres, while at the same time keeping networks
running smoothly, and power consumption costs down,” said Ben
Grimes, Avocent CTO and vice president of corporate strategy
“The findings further tell us that many administrators lack the
tools they need to properly manage power usage in datacentres –
only 55% say they can monitor power usage today, and even then it’s
mostly at the UPS level. These statistics show there’s a huge
opportunity to improve overall datacentre management and a strong
desire to implement ‘Green IT’ solutions.”
Survey respondents also said that 100% network uptime was still
not there. A third of companies had lost mission-critical data due
to unplanned downtime and 43% of companies reported that they
experience, on average, up to five unplanned downtime events per
month. Of those, 17% experienced two to four hours of collective
unplanned downtime per month, mostly due to hardware or power
failures.