IDC: Power Problems Undermine Business Value of Datacenters

Nearly 85 percent of organizations say that issues with datacenter power, space and cooling capacity, along with asset and uptime issues, resulted in delayed or aborted application rollouts, reduced ability to support customers, and unplanned reallocation of budget away from strategic goals during the past year. According to an IDC study, these issues reduce IT's ability to support business innovation and get maximum business value from IT hardware and software investments.

More than 500 IT and facilities professionals at midsized and large organizations in North America, Western Europe, and Latin America participated in the IDC study, entitled “The Datacenter’s Role in Delivering Business Innovation: Using DCIM to Provide a Common Management Approach,” which was sponsored by CA Technologies.

Unfortunately, as the study reveals, datacenter infrastructure issues are significantly undermining the business value returned by these investments. Specific issues cited by the 84 percent of respondents whose datacenter infrastructure is under-performing include power (27 percent), space (27 percent) and cooling (25 percent).

The study revealed the most common reasons things go awry in the datacenter. These include:

• Outdated datacenters. 57 percent of respondents admit that their datacenters are either “inefficient” or only “moderately efficient.”
• Inconsistent datacenter information. Without clear visibility into key datacenter infrastructure metrics, decision-makers can't accurately plan capacity, pro-actively discover potential problems, or optimize allocation of resources such as power, cooling, network connectivity, rack and floor space.

The study highlights the fact that datacenter management tools are often manual and fragmented. It suggests that a more unified approach to Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) can empower organizations to get more value from their existing datacenter investments and better support IT-based business innovation.

More than half of the datacenter managers surveyed said there would be value in having an integrated DCIM solution. Respondents' priorities for a DCIM solution included:

• Real-time monitoring of power, temperature and other variables;
• Alerts and alarms for power and cooling;
• Inventory and asset management;
• and Capacity analysis and planning.

Recently, The New York Times published an expose on data center energy waste after a year-long investigation.