The results are in: the Uptime Institute 2013 Datacenter Survey
With 1000 respondents, the vast majority of who have responsibilities for more than one site, the 2013 Uptime Institute Datacenter Survey provides a reasonable look at the current state of the industry. Interestingly enough, while datacenter spending has, overall, seen a slight upturn, the biggest growth is in the budgeting for third-party services.
My personal favorite tidbit was the tacit acknowledgement that “green” really has become just a buzzword; 77% of the respondents are seeking some form of recognition for their Green initiatives, such as the LEED program, but the percentage of operators actually reporting that they track their year over year carbon impact has actually gone down. Certifications are sexy and play well in annual reports and the media. Actually doing the day-to-day grunt work has far less glamour.
With the cost of power starting to move from facilities to IT budgets, the datacenter operators are seeing the impact of the efficiencies they can implement more directly, but IT, unlike facilities, are more sensitive to the necessity of getting the IT work done as the bottom line. But facilities still takes the hit for power cost in 4 out of 5 businesses. With facilities taking the hit, it’s not surprising that more than a third of the respondents don’t even measure PUE and only 7% actually did detailed measurements for an actual reading. This is despite the fact the over 80% of those that use PUE report numbers in the range of 1.0-2.0 with an average of 1.65
To further confuse the issue, while 67% of the respondents reported less than 5% of the servers in their datacenters were inactive or candidates to be shut down, 43% of respondents don’t do any sort of scheduled audits to determine if servers in this state do exist. It seems that there is an awful lot of “best guess” operation still going on.
The fastest growing market segments for datacenter operators still appears to be DCIM, with 70% of operators at some point in having the capability installed within the next two years. Since DCIM covers such a broad range of capabilities it would be necessary to do some more specific drill down to determine what capabilities are actually being deployed and utilized.
Take a look at the report and draw your own conclusions by downloading it, with required free registration, here.