Aussie data centres grappling with chronic staff shortages: survey

Ian Grayson
Wednesday, 14 January 2009 05:41

IT Industry - Market

The survey found the three primary functions being outsourced by data centres around the world are business continuity, backups and storage management. This is expected to continue throughout 2009.

Also, despite a concerted effort by IT vendors to extol the virtues of server and storage virtualisation technology, the survey found existing capacities inside many data centres are still woefully underutilized.

The data centres surveyed were found to be operating servers at just 53 per cent of their total capacity. Storage utilisation was even worse, coming in at just 50 per cent.

However, in an apparent move to address this situation, 77 per cent of Australian data centres (80 per cent globally) have earmarked server consolidation as a key objective for this year. Storage virtualisation was highlighted as a priority by 53 per cent of Australian centres (76 per cent globally).

Dzienciol says it is encouraging to see from the survey that around 60 per cent of Australian companies expect to increase their IT budgets during the next year. However, he points out that the survey was conducted in late September and early October last year, just as the global financial crisis was beginning to bite.

“We might well see some of the flow on effects of this on budgets later in the year,” he says.