May 17, 2013 - CA Technologies has announced the results of a global study by IDC which examines the challenges organizations face as they seek to drive innovation and gain more value from their data centre investments. According to the study, issues with data centre power, space and cooling capacity—as well as asset and uptime issues—resulted in delayed or aborted application rollouts, reduced ability to support customers, and unplanned reallocation of OpEx and CapEx budget away from strategic goals during the past year. As a result, this reduces IT’s ability to support business innovation and get maximum business value from IT hardware and software investments.
More than 500 IT and facilities professionals at mid-sized and large organizations in North America, Western Europe, and Latin America participated in the study: “The Datacenter’s Role in Delivering Business Innovation: Using DCIM to Provide a Common Management Approach”, which was sponsored by CA Technologies.
“Organizations are spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year on the infrastructure deployed in their data centres, and even more on power and cooling plus IT and Facilities support staff to ensure that current and new applications are highly available,” said Richard Villars, vice president of Datacenter and Cloud at IDC and author of the study. “They must ensure this investment is being spent efficiently and effectively, and supporting the business' overall goals of delivering innovative new products and services.”
The study reveals that data centre infrastructure issues are significantly undermining the business value returned by these investments. Specific issues cited by the 84% of respondents whose data centre infrastructure is under-performing include power (27%), space (27%) and cooling (25%)—as well as imbalances in capacity across multiple sites. Meanwhile, the most common reasons things that go awry in the data centre include outdated data centres, fragmented datacenter operations and inconsistent data centre information, stated the study.
For a more unified approach to data centre management tools, the study suggested Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) can empower organizations to get more value from their existing data centre investments and better support IT-based business innovation.
57% of datacenter managers considered their data centres to be inefficient or moderately inefficient and 63% of respondents did not have a standard set of management tools, continued the study.
“IT and Facilities must work together to deliver the innovation that their C-level management is demanding,” said Villars. “To help achieve this, organizations should look to implement a DCIM solution that takes a unified approach to management across all aspects of the data centre.”
“Data centres present major challenges for organizations today, and these can have impacts on the business,” said Terrence Clark, general manager, Energy and Sustainability solutions, CA Technologies. “Conventional approaches often make it difficult to monitor and manage data centre space, power, cooling and assets effectively.
“DCIM addresses these challenges and helps organizations to leverage data center infrastructure for higher efficiency, reduced risk and the increased agility needed to address expanding business demands,” he continued.
