What Data Center Managers Want This Year

SANpulse Technologies, Inc. has released the results of its December 2010 IT survey of over 100 large enterprises about what data center managers want over the next year as well as the difficult tasks they’re likely to confront in 2011.

The study asked “data center managers and decision makers” to rank their priorities; they also asked individual respondents to list the most challenging projects they’ll face this year.

Among the findings: just over half (51 percent) put “technology refreshes” at the top of their wish list, noting that the “mean time to migrate (MTTM) was critical for rapid adoption of new technologies and fast execution of these operations.” In second place: data center consolidation (cited by 41.5 percent as their top concern).

Topping the “tough issues” list: 39 percent said it was multi-departmental coordination.

Data center managers were in sync with other studies I’ve read about their interest in moving to the cloud (34.5 percent said they intend to migrate to a public or private cloud this year). Almost a third (32.7 percent) expect their data center will move to a virtualized storage area network (SAN), and more than a quarter (26.5 percent) expect to work on SAN optimization or re-tiering.

SAN migrations proved problematic; 41.5 percent said only 0 to 20 percent of their migrations were successful (that is, completed on time and within budget). The percent rises to 62 percent when measuring success for up to 40 percent of migrations.

-- James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ

Posted on 01/25/2011