Data centre chiefs under more pressure

Virtualisation on the wish list...

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 per cent admitted having more difficulty meeting those demands in the last two years.

More than two-thirds (69 per cent) of them said their data centres are growing at least five per cent per year, while 11 per cent reported 20 per cent growth or more. But the average budget increase in the last two years is a modest seven per cent, 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 per cent are at least discussing server virtualisation, while 50 per cent 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.