Aperture Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise software solutions that enable organisations worldwide to manage the physical infrastructure of their data centers, has established the Aperture Research Institute to share market intelligence about data center management. This is the first organisation dedicated to researching data centers, their challenges and best practice management. The Institute's first report entitled 'Organisations Struggle with Data Center Capacity Management' is available now from http://www.aperture.com/research_institute/ari_cap_mgmt_112306.pdf.
Aperture Research Institute conducted a survey of over 100 enterprise data centers, spread across a spectrum of company sizes and industries, including banking, insurance, healthcare, data services, retail, and telecommunications. The study demonstrates that managing data center capacity is a significant challenge, with many companies unable to predict their capacity needs accurately.
37% of those surveyed admitted they had run out of space, power or cooling capacity without sufficient notice in the last two years. Only 6% considered they were 'excellent' at predicting when additional space or power infrastructure will be needed, with 10% describing their abilities as 'poor' and 27% as merely 'fair'.
Capacity planning procedures are partly at fault, with 41% of those surveyed saying theirs were poor (11%) or fair (30%). Only 20% considered their procedures to be great (14%) or excellent (5%).
The challenge of assessing future infrastructure needs was named by 90% of respondents as being a medium or high priority.
The top five challenges, chosen by respondents as high priorities in managing the data center's capacity, are:
1. Limitations on cooling capacity
2. Limitations of the power distribution system
3. Achieving sufficient airflow through racks
4. Assessing future infrastructure needs
5. Amount of total power delivered from the utility
William T Clifford, CEO, Aperture Research Institute, said: "The management of the applications layer of the data center is already mature, but our research shows that many data centers still struggle to manage the physical constraints of the environment. It's shocking that so many data centers have run out of space and consider their ability to plan future capacity needs to be inadequate. The only thing you know for certain is that businesses and demands on the data center change, and successful data centers are those that can handle that change."
He adds: "Ten years ago, we might have expected space to be the major limitation, but the introduction of power hungry technologies like blade servers is changing that. The next generation of data centers will have to accommodate far greater cooling and power distribution requirements than many of today's legacy data centers were designed to handle."