Data centres continue to be filled with more and more IT systems, but enterprises aren’t necessarily hiring more people to manage that new equipment, two surveys have found.
In a survey conducted in March by AFCOM , a data centre managers group, 37 per cent of the respondents said they had reduced their data centre staffs over the past three years, and 29 per cent said they kept their staffing levels the same. The balance, nearly 35 per cent, increased staffing.
But over that same period, nearly 74 per cent of the data centres increased their physical server count, according to the AFCOM poll of 360 IT managers and other senior IT executives.
The upshot is that 66 per cent the data centres covered in the AFCOM survey are managing more systems with the same number of people or fewer.
A separate study by Metrics Based Assessments, also released in March, explains what’s happening.
MBA, a data centre research firm that benchmarks about 100 data centres annually, reported that in 2006, the number of Linux operating system images supported by the equivalent of a single full-time systems administrator was 9.2, but by 2010 it was 17.1, an 86 per cent increase. Over that same period, the number of Windows images supported by a single full-time staffer increased 61 per cent, and the number of Unix images per staffer rose 38 per cent, according to MBA.
“What we’re really seeing is that people are adding capacity, but they are not increasing staff size, and somehow the staff is figuring out how to deal with it,” says Mark Levin, a partner at MBA. “And a lot of it has to do with improved levels of automation or things of that nature.”
But even with technical improvements, Levin says, productivity gains are being achieved because data centre workers are simply taking on more work.
“Server virtualization, server management software and data centre automation are making the data centre more efficient,” says John Longwell, vice-president of research at Computer Economics, an IT research firm in Irvine, Calif. “At the same time, server counts are still rising, despite all the yakking about server consolidation and data centre consolidation.”
But this is also a consistent long-term trend. Computer operators (now called systems administrators) used to account for about 10per cent of the IT staff back in 1997, says Longwell. Today, they account for 3.3 per cent of the IT staff.
Another major trend that’s shaping data centres is the growth of cloud computing . In October 2009, only 14 per cent of data centres had implemented any form of cloud computing, according to the AFCOM survey. That figure now stands at 36 per cent.
“Our prediction is that 80 per cent to 90 per cent of all data centres will be adopting some form of cloud computing in the next five years,” says Jill Eckhaus, CEO of AFCOM, which has made cloud computing a priority in its training programs.
Eckhaus says data centre managers are more interested in private clouds for control and security reasons, but she notes that AFCOM’s adoption estimate also includes use of public cloud services.
In terms of budgets, nearly 38 per cent of the respondents to the AFCOM survey said they expect their companies to increase their data centre budgets in 2011, while 41per cent said they expect funding to remain the same and 20per cent said it would decline.
Eckhaus says the survey also found that 15 per cent of the data centres don’t have data backup and recovery plans, and about 30 per cent don’t have backup sites. “To me, these statistics are shocking,” she says.
Levin says he isn’t surprised by the lack of spending on or attention to disaster recovery. “We thought after 9/11 there would be a significant increase in disaster recovery spending — it never happened,” he says.
Computerworld (US)
