Doing more with less is an expression which has gained increasing currency over recent months as a statement of response to both prevailing economic conditions and to continuing resource pressures (power, people, space among others) on the datacenter. Information from datacenter owners and operators attending DatacenterDynamics events on whether investment in their datacenters is projected to increase, decrease or stay about the same in the 12 months following each event is shown below. The chart shows the proportion of organisations projecting increase, decrease or parity over the period and has not been weighted by the amount of investment. The findings suggest that the proportion decreasing their budget into 2009 has remained at around one in five for most of the past five quarters and that over the same time period shown the proportion projecting increase has declined from 20%+ to 11% in the last quarter of 2008:

Responses from 792 datacenter owners and operators located in five markets – the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands and Spain – through the course of 2008 indicate that 17.8% of those organizations providing financial information project budget decrease going into 2009. This group operate facilities than are larger, older and of lower power consumption than the European average. How does a reduction in budget impact on their plans for the coming 12 months? The research findings do not suggest that budget reduction will lead to a cessation of activity. The chart below is based on the proportion of each sample intending to increase particular components of their facility infrastructure into 2009 and it compares those organizations increasing their budget and those decreasing it from 2008 into 2009. While there are some differences between the two groups and those increasing their budget appear to anticipate a greater degree of increase, a majority of those decreasing budget still intend to increase their number of racks and their average power consumption. Both groups appear set on a path of reduction in their number of facilities:

There does however appear to be re-focusing among these organizations in terms of what they are looking for from the solutions and technologies they will be bringing into their datacenters in 2009. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the need to reduce ongoing costs has been pushed up the agenda when compared to owners and operators who intend to increase their budget into 2009. The importance of reducing ‘upfront’ design, installation and/or build costs remains similar between both groups but the importance to those reducing budgets of maintaining availability is markedly greater. Thus, the first priority to these organizations in a situation of budget reduction is to focus on the core function.

Budget reduction correlates with the increased consideration of certain technologies and solutions, and a diminished interest in others. In particular, there is correlation between budget reduction and lower levels of interest in moving the primary datacenter(s) out of central City areas, in rack-level management and monitoring technologies and in a number of cooling solutions while there is increased interest in full datacenter automation software and in virtualization technologies.

The reduction group considers far more strongly that efficiency is tied in with improvements to datacenter software solutions. There may therefore be an indication here that in the face of budget reduction, ‘whole of datacenter’ IT architecture and software solutions are seen as one way of dealing with it. This analysis is taken from the Datacenter Research Group report “Western Europe: Datacenter Investment & Infrastructure Trends 2007-2009” which looks in greater detail at the impact of current economic conditions on markets in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands and Spain. The full report will be available in February 2009. For further details of this and other 2009 Research Group publications please contact Chris Lambert on +44 (0) 207 377 1907 or at Chris.Lambet@datacenterdynamics.com