Cost containment, business continuity key drivers of Australian data centers

By eGovInnovation Editors | Mar 10, 2011

Thumbnail: 

SYDNEY -- Cost containment, business continuity and capacity issues are the most important drivers of strategic change in Australian data centers in 2011, according to a recent survey by analyst firm Gartner Inc.

While green IT and sustainability ranked lower down the list, Gartner analysts believe there is a high probability that many Australian CIOs would link these with cost containment.

“Australian companies are focusing on optimizing the cost structure of the data center with the aim of supporting business growth in the near future,” said Phillip Sargeant, research vice president at Gartner. “IT managers are evaluating ways to save money from routine operations and use the savings for running transformational IT projects with significant business impact.”

One of the biggest challenges faced by Australian data centers that is forcing change is data growth, with many Australian data centers running out of capacity. Around 59 percent of survey respondents ranked data growth as the leading infrastructure challenge, followed by system performance and scalability (37 percent), and network congestion and connectivity architecture (36 percent). While all the top infrastructure challenges impact cost to some degree, data growth is particularly associated with increased costs relative to hardware, software, associated maintenance, administration and services.
 
The top three technologies that respondents plan to invest in through 2011 are server virtualization (97 percent), application consolidation or rationalization (72 percent) and blade servers (72 percent). These figures for Australia are significantly higher than global results.

“Australian organizations are at the head of the curve and tend to be early adopters of emerging technologies,” said Mr Boon. “Australia has some of the highest penetration rates of virtualization globally within organizations. With interest in cloud computing increasing, it is likely that Australian organizations will be very early adopters as virtualization helps to drive it.”