Published on the 14/08/2009 | Written by Newsdesk
Analyst firm Aperture Research reports that the economic slowdown has had little effect on the demand for IT services. Datacentre managers are looking to energy efficiencies and better use of resources to cope with the demand…
Datacentres are struggling to meet demand as, despite the economic downturn, there has been no let-up in the demand for IT services, but budgets are not being increased to match.
Analyst firm, the Aperture Research Institute, says, in its 2009 survey of 100 datacentre managers, report that there will be no let-up in these circumstances for the next two years, with datacentres being expected to do more with less.
However, there is a green upside to all this. Eighty percent of those surveyed said they could create 10 percent extra capacity through better management of assets.
They are also looking to green initiatives to help – 87 percent said they had a green programme in place and most expected to continue, or increase, with these.
The report says the growth of demand for IT services is positive for business and the economy, as it leads to better productivity and more competitive companies that encourage economic growth.
It says datacentres tend to over-provision power or cooling so as to better manage risk and it is here that managers think they can squeeze more capacity from existing resources. An earlier Aperture report found that only 38 percent of datacentre managers thought the information they had on their resources was accurate, so improvements in this data could help unlock energy savings.
The downturn is actually driving green initiatives to save on power, which is a key driver of datacentre costs. “By improving energy efficiency, datacentres can cut their operating expenses and better meet increasing demands at a time when budgets are flat,” says the report.
“With the global economy in downturn, datacentre managers are being faced with the combined challenge of rising demand for IT services and tightening budgets. This is forcing them to find new ways of doing more with less,” says Steve Yellen, principal of Aperture.
“It appears… [they] are placing a greater focus on the utilisation and efficiency of existing resources. This is likely to cause a revitalised focus on tools that provide insight into resource allocation and use.”
