Effective Data Centers DC

By CIO Canada staff, CIO.com,

Almost half of organizations lack basic management information and processes to ensure efficient running of their data centers, according to a survey of 100 data center organizations across a range of industries, conducted by Aperture Research Institute.

The research revealed 49 percent of those surveyed are not able to track physical changes in their data center including space, power and cooling.

Data center managers admitted to using between three to five different systems to store configuration information, making it difficult to aggregate information onto a single view. Only 6 percent of those surveyed use a single system to document everything.

Aperture Research Institute, which specializes in data center research, said one reason for this lack of basic management information was the slow implementation of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library.

"ITIL grabbed a lot of traction within IT groups, but it stopped at the server," said Steven Yellen, vice president of product and market strategies at Aperture. Yellen said just 29 percent of organizations were implementing ITIL in the data center. Data centers confess to poor configuration management with less than a third implementing ITIL, he added.

Yellen said that the pressure to reduce the environmental impact of the data center is going to encourage data center managers to look at ITIL. "The move to a green data center is going to force people to bring that on. Power usage is just as important as storage. The push to go green, whether it be decommissioning old equipment to analyzing power consumption, will push organizations to have an added level of detail around change management processes, and look more closely at ITIL."

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