Mobility putting pressure on data centre managers: Analyst

Mobility and the unstructured data it creates is putting pressure on data centre managers to grow systems, according to the latest predictions from analyst firm Gartner.

Gartner Australia managing vice-president, Matthew Boon, said mobility is having an impact on data centre requirements as more and more individuals want access to information.

In-depth: Data centre migration guide.

“The challenge that data centre managers face is not just how they can grow the systems to manage storage, [but] a lot of that is unstructured data,” Boon said. “It’s not efficient, so they’re looking at leveraging software technologies such as thin provisioning.”

While Cloud was popular with the organisations the firm surveyed, Gartner argued vendors still need to better understand and articulate the long-term cost benefits of Cloud. “We have a number of vendors exhibiting at Gartner’s Data Centre Summit this year and we’re telling them that they need to do a much better job of articulating what the longer term benefits are from a cost model and business advantage perspective,” Boon said.

This is critical, as Boon said investment in data centre infrastructure and operations accounts for up to 40 per cent of an IT budget. “Within Australia, we see the highest penetration rate of server virtualization anywhere in the world,” he said.

According to Boon, organisations that have virtualized have less systems running in the data centre, which reduces the need for power and cooling. “If you think about a data centre, historically they were cooled very inefficiently but virtualization allows a more zoned approach,” he said.

Boon added that adopting different design principles could lead to a smaller, more efficient data centre.

“Historically, organisations tend to build their data centres out in a very horizontal fashion but if companies adopt virtualization, they can reduce space and increase computational power,” he said.

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU

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