Data center management gets more complex

http://hardware.silicon.com/storage/0,39024649,39168991,00.htm and http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0321243.htm

Data centre chiefs are struggling with staff shortages, more work to do and minimal increases in budgets.
According to research from Symantec, the biggest challenges for data centre managers are tough internal service-level agreements, continuing data centre expansion and staffing issues.

Two-thirds of respondents said formal internal service-level agreements exist in their organisation - although 51 per cent admitted having more difficulty meeting those demands in the last two years.

More than two-thirds (69 per cent) of them said their data centres are growing at least five per cent per year, while 11 per cent reported 20 per cent growth or more. But the average budget increase in the last two years is a modest seven per cent, which adjusted for inflation means data centre budget growth has “been minimal during the past five years”, said Symantec.

Is it not that more and more data center managers are finding that the we’re reaching capacity in terms of space, power and cooling; as well as the demand for reporting on the data center, on managing the data center information is becoming more important. The concept that a business person could call up and ask “what space and power does the derivatives application use”, without understanding that we might have a list of servers, of assets in the data center, but it might be a manual process linking those systems back to the logical business units or applications. Not to mention the need for data center teams to understand the power, the cooling as well as the electrical aspects of the data center. An interesting read, do check it out.