* Data center needs growing more quickly than IT budgets
Four major themes emerged in Nemertes’ latest data center research, drawn from interviews with 82 data center managers, CIOs, IT directors and other IT executives from 65 companies. Regardless of size or industry, the companies were dealing with major changes centered on issues of consolidation, growth, availability, and operational efficiency. This week we examine the issues around growth.
Even while companies are attempting to consolidate resources in fewer data centers, those resources are multiplying. The average enterprise has more than 1,200 applications, but even that number is increasing every year. As business units create demand for new applications, or increase demand on existing applications, IT has to keep deploying servers to keep up. Rapid growth is causing strain in data centers, with insufficient capacity in environmental controls (cooling, humidity controls), power supplies and floor space. Companies struggle to balance between large footprint (sprawl of low-density servers) and high density (super-hot and power-hungry, dense racks).
According to our research, companies are reporting an average increase of 11% in the number of servers, year-on-year. This growth puts strain on all aspects of IT because it is not matched by equivalent growth in IT budgets or IT staff numbers. So, you have more servers but the same number of people to maintain and manage them and only slightly more budget with which to buy tools and systems to help you in managing servers. Furthermore, the cost of real estate makes it prohibitive, in most cases, to just keep expanding the footprint (floor space used by the server racks). Instead, a majority of companies are turning to virtualization technologies to control the growth of physical servers, even while the number of virtual machines increases.
Existing servers are already mostly underutilized, with CPU utilization below 25% for many applications. To be ready for future demand and expansion, servers are over-provisioned with plenty of spare CPU cycles. Unfortunately, they still take up space and management time, whether they have 10% or 100% CPU utilization. So, most companies consolidate existing servers into virtual machines (several virtual servers running on a single physical server) and use the newly “freed” physical servers to accommodate the growth in demand for applications.
Of course, it is not just servers that are growing. Storage, networking, security and management tools must also grow to support all these new applications and virtual (or physical) servers. Even without the other pressures on storage growth (compliance and document retention, medical imaging, etc.), each new server and each new application will require at minimum some storage for configuration files and most likely some new storage for the application data. The growth in storage is dwarfing the growth in servers and putting even more pressure on IT departments. Different industry verticals have varying degrees of storage growth, but the median is a staggering 22% year-on-year.
Managing extreme growth with less-than-spectacular increases in budgets and headcounts gives IT directors headaches. Virtualization can help you control that growth somewhat, but virtualization will also increase the need for management and automation tools. At the end of the day the only way to manage more with less is through automation and higher productivity.
