Data Center Changes Come Slow and Steady

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Data center

Budgets are flattening as the number of organizations increasing spending dropped from 45% in 2013. For this year, 32% see an increase, 26% a decrease and 46% say it will remain the same.

Server hardware still dominates the IT agenda: standardization/consolidation/refresh: 60%; private cloud: 15%; cloud virtualization infrastructure: 14%.

IT organizations appear to have most issues under control: cost/budget: 16%; virtual machine monitoring: 12%; storage issues: 12%; infrastructure management: 12%; insufficient resources: 11%.

Almost half (47%) report major changes to the IT team in last 12 months: reorganized: 40%; integrated teams: 27%; staff reduction: 21%; increased staff and responsibility: 7%; outsourced: 4%.

Agility is becoming an increasingly important performance indicator: time to provision: 22%; time to resolution: 21%; uptime: 17%; servers managed per full-time employee: 16%; availability: 8%; service-level agreements: 7%.

It takes many years for emerging technologies to gain acceptance in the data center: microservers: 94%; cloud appliance: 81%; data/business analytics appliance: 71%; converged infrastructure: 66%; unified computing: 58%; database and data warehouse appliance: 56%; solid-state disk or flash memory: 52%.

Advanced management capabilities are still a tough sell: policy-based service management: 80%; pay-per-use accounting (chargeback): 74%; assured-availability management software: 72%; policy-based provisioning: 69%; root-cause analysis: 62%.

Software spending is starting to move ahead of hardware: x86 hypervisor software: 41%; Linux: 32%; x86 blade servers: 30%; unified computing: 21%; converged infrastructure: 20%.