Biggest IT challenge for 2010: Budget cuts vs. quality of service

News 2010-02-10 12:33

Dave Allen, UK MD at NetApp says we will see widespread adoption of virtualisation as a means to do more with less, as

A survey conducted by data management and storage vendor NetApp has revealed that limited IT budget (34 percent) and maintaining quality of service despite budget cuts (32 percent) are the biggest challenges IT professionals will face in 2010.

The research, which surveyed 200 IT professionals from a range of industries, indicated that expansion is not on the agenda for UK businesses, but that almost half (48 percent) plan to utilise the technology assets they have to increase efficiency and minimise costs. Carbon footprint reduction was less of a priority (10 percent), with IT professionals preferring to focus on data centre consolidation (37 percent) instead.

Dave Allen, UK MD at NetApp comments: “Despite signs of economic recovery, this research shows that IT departments are still very cautious. Keeping costs low remains at the very top of the IT agenda. Storage efficiency will be critical for businesses looking to make the most of the technology they have, and within this we expect to see widespread adoption of virtualisation as a means to do more with less as well as some businesses starting to explore the cloud to outsource specific applications.”

He adds: “Going green is still on the list, but has been overshadowed by a need to cut expenditure and drive down costs. The good news is that those businesses that make their IT infrastructure work harder, using storage efficiency technologies like data de-duplication, virtualisation, thin provisioning and data cloning for example, will find that reduced energy consumption and a greener result will follow.”

For the majority of organisations storage is under-utilised, with businesses typically only using between 25 - 40 percent of their storage assets. This means that 60 - 75 percent of storage space is wasted that still needs to be powered, cooled and maintained, and that businesses may purchase un-needed storage space. Storage efficient technologies can reduce the amount of storage space required and increase usage of existing assets. Technologies like virtualisation and data de-duplication provide immediate cost savings in the form of reduced power requirements and can offset the need to purchase more storage or build additional datacentres.

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Storage