Human impact
Human error remains one of the biggest causes of unplanned network downtime, according to Symantec's latest State of the Data Centre Report 2008 released last month. Commissioned by Symantec, US-based Applied Research conducted the report and surveyed 1600 companies worldwide: 414 in Asia Pacific and 30 in Australia.
The report found that globally 25 percent of network downtime incidents in 2008 were caused by human error, and companies, as they did in 2007, still see it as one of their biggest causes. Similarly, the Australian results found that 19 percent of local companies surveyed blamed human error. Hardware or software failure and power outages were also some of the key causes of unplanned downtime for Australian respondents.
"Human error is always going to show up on the radar. I think that's what you'll find as an average, doesn't matter how much infrastructure you put in place, there is always going to be that human error impact," said Symantec's David Dzienciol, senior director, enterprise sales and partners, Pacific region.
Careless employees or unqualified employees? The problem may well be blamed on the skills shortage that had been plaguing businesses especially in Australia for the past several years. According to the survey, 43 percent of the respondents globally and 46 percent in Australia said finding qualified applicants was a big or huge problem.
And things aren't looking to get easier for data centre operators despite the economic downturn and Australia's latest unemployment rate rising to 4.5 percent, manpower, especially in highly skilled technology roles remains an issue.
"This report taught us that 46 percent of Australian companies are still understaffed in the data centre. The key thing here is finding the right applicants and that's really where the focus is going to be, how do I find people to come into my data centre and manage my data centre?" said Dzienciol.
He said one of the trends Symantec picked up from the report is that organisations are cross training their IT staff across multiple disciplines, from one database platform to another. "Organisations want to get their staff cross skilled so they don't have to go out to market every time they come across a new project," he said.
At the same time, Dzienciol believes the staffing issue presented through the report presents a good opportunity for Symantec's channel partners. "Organisations will look to the channel to selectively out-task particular projects, in particular where those projects are aligned with cost savings and automation. We've seen over time that the channel plays a very specialised role around emerging technologies."
The report, which surveyed managers, directors or VPs from businesses with 5000 or more employees, found that in 2008 data centre managers said there was room for improvement in the area of disaster recovery (DR) policies.
According to the results, 35 percent of respondents globally and 27 percent in Australia reported that their disaster recovery plan is above average, while 22 percent globally and 30 percent in Australia said it needed work. Furthermore, only six percent globally and three percent in Australia said their plan is informal or undocumented.
"From the DR perspective, and we saw this in 2007 as well, it has demonstrated that there is significant room for improvement in DR. Certainly our view would be to get that number higher than 27 percent," said Dzienciol. The important thing to remember is that organisations tend to look at DR after the fact, rather than through a planning process.
A disaster recovery plan provides practical strategies to follow in a crisis, such as fire, flood, storm, explosion, adverse market or financial circumstances, terrorism, computer viruses or power outages.
The Federal Government states that a business continuity plan should be tailored to fit an individual business, but a typical plan will include a list of essential business requirements such as identify risks and assessing the impact they would have on your business; and a strategy to respond to, manage, and recover from an incident.
Standards Australia, recognised by the Australian Government as Australia's peak standards body, has a set of standards on business continuity management practices which can be found on the government's national security website.
"I think everyone's ultimate goal would be to have a DR plan in place that they are very comfortable with which they know, should a disaster strike, that they are prepared," said Dzienciol.
Simon Durkin, director of sales for systems availability services provider, Interactive, said he finds the percentages presented by Symantec to be consistent with what he sees in the marketplace, however he also believes that a robust disaster recovery solution is an evolutionary process.
"Our experience shows, that once a customer has an initial DR solution, over time the solution will build-out to meet the ever-changing needs of the business," he said.
Durkin's experience in the local industry has led him to believe that Australian companies have been on top of DR solutions for a while. "Companies have had disaster recovery solutions in place for many years. Each year (after the completion of their scheduled test/rehearsal or as the business changes) they review if/where the solution can be improved," he said.
Meanwhile, the report found that the top data centre disaster recovery plan components include, restoring from backup, (65 percent) followed by replication (41 percent) and offsite backup (39 percent).
Server initiatives
Servers in the data centre remain underutilised, according to the results of Symantec's data centre survey. In 2008, the results were worse than the previous year's report which found server utilisation to be 70 percent in 2007 while in 2008, only 60 percent of data centre servers' were being utilised.
According to Dzienciol, the rate at which new applications are being rolled out is causing the servers to be underutilised. He believes as organisations deploy more applications they're also buying new infrastructure instead of looking at their existing infrastructure that can do more with less but this should start changing in 2009.
"You'll find going into to 2009, as organisations look to do more with less, automate and try to leverage technologies that are single heterogeneous technologies across different server platforms will actually help organisations increase their utilisation," said Dzienciol.
"The report found that 90 percent of Australian respondents were standardising in one layer of software, that's telling us there is that desire to have one common platform across the infrastructure," he added.
In face, the report found that data centre managers are indeed planning ways to increase their server utilisation with 88 percent of respondents saying they are pursuing a strategy of standardising one layer of software that will work across most application and hardware platforms. Forty-six percent are at the early stages of the process discussing/planning and 42 percent in trials or implementing.
Meanwhile, data centre storage utilisation was even lower at 50 percent. Symantec believes that while storage capacity continues to grow, it remains underutilised.
In 2008, companies reported a median of 128 terabytes of raw storage within the organisation (up from 100 in 2007). To remedy the growth in storage needs majority of respondents, that is, four out of five said they are exploring storage virtualisation, with half in discussing/planning versus 31 percent trialing or implementing. File-based virtualisation is at 63 percent, up from 45 percent in 2007.
The applications most driving storage growth were business intelligence, enterprise applications and web applications and 77 percent of companies are working on data deplucication.
Budget
At the time when Applied Research conducted the survey in late September 2008 through to early October 2008, Wall Street was on the brink of collapse and the world economic downturn was taking effect.
However, even before the full effects of the crisis were felt, data centre managers had a strong drive to reduce costs. According to Symantec, the net result was a flurry of initiatives in the data centre targeted at increasing IT efficiency.
In fact, the results found that reducing costs was mentioned by more companies than the next two objectives combined. The initiatives mentioned most often to fight costs in order of popularity included:
"The survey was done in the peak time when the reports about the financial crisis were taking place. There was a reasonably high statistic with 60 percent of Australian companies saying they were increasing IT budgets, I'm sure we'll see that come back slightly but what the research confirms for us is that organisations right now are spending time on initiatives that will have a more immediate cost reduction rather than longer term return on investment, said Dzienciol. "What can I do today to reap the benefits from today over the next 12 months."
1. Increasing automation of routine tasks.
2. Cross-training IT staff.
3. Server virtualisation/server consolidation.
Disaster recovery
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