Symantec: Virtualisation a cure for data-centre woes

Data-centre chiefs are struggling with staff shortages, more work to do and minimal increases in budgets.

According to research from Symantec, the biggest challenges for data-centre managers are tough internal service-level agreements, continuing data-centre expansion and staffing issues.

Two-thirds of respondents said formal internal service-level agreements exist in their organisation — although 51 percent admitted having more difficulty meeting those demands in the last two years.

More than two-thirds (69 percent) of respondents said their data centres are growing at least five percent per year, while 11 percent reported 20 percent growth or more. But the average budget increase in the last two years is a modest seven percent, which, adjusted for inflation, means data-centre budget growth has "been minimal during the past five years", said Symantec.

According to the report, server virtualisation and consolidation are top options for managing costs — it found that 90 percent of respondents are at least discussing server virtualisation, while 50 percent are implementing virtualisation, with similar figures for server consolidation.

Data-centre staffing challenges are "pervasive", the survey said. Nine out of 10 data-centre managers said they have difficulty finding qualified applicants.

The online survey was completed by 800 data-centre managers in 14 countries.