- Microsoft lays out SQL Server road map
- Credit card skimming
- Nortel's stock market capitalization plummets
- The Obama campaign's Search Engine to Nowhere
- Will Apple be forced to make more money?
Newsletters | Podcasts | Chats | Opinions | RSS Feeds | This Week In Print | IT Careers | Community | Reports | Downloads | Slideshows | New Data Center
Partner Sites:Application Performance Solutions | App Performance | Networking Solution | SafeGuard Enterprise Solution Center | SOA | Test your Web Filter | Value of WDS
Nemertes' latest data center research involved interviews with 82 IT executives - CIOs, IT directors, data center managers, and other professionals from a range of industries and company sizes - between January and March 2006. Each company may have different challenges in the data center, but overall we discovered four main themes.
Consolidation
Whether due to regulatory compliance or the increasing cost and complexity of IT, companies of all kinds are consolidating and centralizing IT resources, including data centers. Specifically, IT managers are consolidating dozens of data centers into a few central locations, then enhancing the capacity of those few across all key areas: networking, redundancy, computing, storage and management.
This trend has significant impacts. For example, data and applications are increasingly delivered to remote users over a WAN (our research shows as few as 11% of workers work at headquarters), which in turn affects WAN architecture and management. Also, centralized data is more easily backed up, made redundant, and controlled for compliance, so consolidation is sparking major initiatives in all these areas. Finally, centralized applications, delivered over the Web, client-server protocols or thin clients, are becoming the norm, as they are easier to manage, update and patch against security exposures.
Growth
Demand for data center resources has generated tremendous growth for servers (growing 11% per year on average) and storage (growing at a median rate of 22%). Rapid growth is straining data centers’ capacities in environmental control, power, and space as companies struggle to find balance between sprawling low-density racks and super-hot and power-hungry high-density racks.
Availability
Business demand for higher availability is increasing across all industries. Half of all participants list availability as one of the top challenges. Correspondingly, almost half of the research participants are setting up secondary data centers for continuity and disaster recovery, either by repurposing an existing data center, or by building new facilities in which they consolidate existing data centers. These secondary and tertiary data centers are often built more than 200 miles from the primary data center as a result of post-Katrina re-evaluations of traditional assumptions about a potential disaster’s reach.

Ever since there have been stocks and shares there have been so called "pump 'n' dump" scams. This...
Spyware: Know Your EnemyLike Macavity, the fictional feline in T. S. Eliot's well-known poem, spyware may be considered to...
The Online Shadow Economy: A Billion Dollar Market For Malware AuthorsMalware, meaning computer viruses, trojans and spyware, is about money. The teenagers who wrote...

Microsoft SQL Server has enjoyed phenomenal success as a database server. Its relatively low cost,...
Minimizing the Risk of Information Security Breaches: Best Practices for SOA Governance and Compliance - Live October 21Today's enterprises face more information security risks and vulnerabilities than ever before....
Migrating to Windows Vista: Necessity and OpportunityThe Vista era of Windows is here. Yet most organizations will retain Windows XP alongside new Vista...

Managing a newly virtualized environment can be tricky. Effectively deploy this technology with the...
Data Center DecisionsData Center Decisions Made Easier. Learn about the latest tech trends that impact your data center...
Closing the Loop: Extending Wireless LAN Security to Wireless PrintersEnterprises cannot overlook wireless printers when assessing network security. The print jobs and...
Partner Content
Explore the Ultrium Edge
The powerful tape technology can address data security with tape encryption as well as long term data protection.
Find out more
Disk and Tape Square Off
Discover what disk and tape really cost -- and which solution provides lower total cost of ownership and optimizes energy use for your organization
Download the White Paper
Don't Fall For The Myths
The Clipper Group explores the truth behind the myths of tape, digging into the misconceptions in the disk vs. tape debate.
Download the White Paper
Will You Add Tape Too?
Over two thirds of disk-only users look to add tape back into storage infrastructure according to recent survey.
Download Survey Information
Comment