Let’s Reconsider Our Fixation on Data Centers as ‘Cost Centers’

Symantec Corporation just released its annual “State of the Data Center” report, based on interviews and data collected from 900 enterprise sites throughout the world, and found, no surprise, that data centers are squeezed between tight budgets and rising end-user expectations. Looking forward over the coming year, consolidation and virtualization are the watchwords for data centers of all stripes, as managers seek innovative strategies to get more bangs for their bucks.

These are all good strategies, and companies need to do everything they can do keep the costs of data centers from spiraling out of control. However, there’s a tone to this, as well as in similar reports and vendor pronouncements in general, that has a one-dimensional aspect to it.

That is, they still reflect the old-line thinking that data centers are cost centers, and are necessary evils, like taxes and door locks. What is needed is more perspective on the growing contribution data centers are making to the business, in terms of greater agility, on-demand capacity, and improving business time to market. For every dollar invested in data center infrastructure, x number of dollars are returned to the business.

As long as data centers are viewed as cost centers, they will constantly be under pressure to do a lot more with less.

It’s not that organizations aren’t willing to keep accelerating data center expenditures. Overall, in fact, Symantec projects that data center budgets will grow about seven percent over the coming year, which is probably more than any corporate functional area could ask for. However, this is not likely to be anywhere near enough of a funding increase to the cover the rapidly proliferating growth of data and end-users demanding 24×7 availability.

The squeeze is being addressed through a number of cost containment strategies, but the impact is being felt the most in skills and staffing. Tight budgets are putting a damper on managers’ ability to hire enough talent to fulfill growing demands. More than half the data center managers said they are understaffed and are having difficulty finding suitable workers. Plus, about half indicated that retaining good employees is a huge or big problem, and about a third said they were losing people through retirement. Six out of ten said that many employees’ skills tend to be too narrow, or do not match the needs of their positions. Positions most in demand include network security specialists, application systems architects, and systems administrators.

Many organizations address this cost squeeze through outsourcing. In fact, while two out of five organizations outsource at least some IT functions, most do so for cost-saving reasons. (Only eight percent said they outsource to acquire needed skill sets.) Among the most common tasks outsourced are server maintenance, backups, storage management, archiving, and business continuity.

Symantec documented what types of cost-containment activities are prevalent across data centers at this time. The emphasis for data centers over the coming year will be adopting cost-containment strategies that make use of new technologies, including virtualization, and new management approaches, such as those that automate routine processes.

In what must be good news for the IBM mainframe division, server consolidation ranks as the top strategy for cost containment, cited by 75 percent. Virtualization is the second choice of cost-containment strategy, followed by task automation.

Storage is another area ripe for data center cost containment. Symantec found that storage virtualization is a popular strategy, now employed by two out of five data center managers. This covers two forms of virtualization – storage block virtualization, in which blocks of storage capacity on different arrays appear to be part of one storage array; and file virtualization, in which files stored in different locations appear to applications to be part of a single file system

Two out of five sites now have storage resource management (SRM) strategies in place. The great interest in SRM is primarily due to the benefits it provides when managing a mixed-vendor, mixed-device storage environment. In particular, 58 percent of the respondents who were at least considering SRM said it would help simplify management of their storage tiers; 54 percent said it would also help automate many of the manual processes they must now perform. Additional cost-containment strategies being adopted to control storage costs include unified server and storage management, internal “storage as a service” solutions, deduplication, and data lifecycle management.

The Symantec survey did not cover “Green” data center initiatives, which also play a role in cost containment, and can substantially reduce power costs. However, while Green IT initiatives are getting a lot of press, separate surveys find very low adoption rates at this point.

As the survey shows, companies are taking a range of actions to provide more data center services. However, cost containment is only one side of the story. As much corporate energy should be focused on leveraging data center assets as it is on cost cutting. The story that needs more attention is how data centers are no longer simply cost centers; they are engines for business growth.