Data Center Management On Priority List of Indian ITDMs

Big Data, Cloud Computing, Mobility, Business Processing and Software Defined Enterprise seen as the most important technology trend for ITDMs

Dell, leading end-to-end solutions provider recently announced the results of its Future Ready IT Survey conducted by Penn Schoen Berland (PSB), to identify the key requirements driving IT decision making across the globe. The survey interviewed respondents about the most important IT trends, significance of hyperscale computing, workloads, data center management and converged Infrastructure and how these would play a role in shaping the data center.

“At Dell, customer conversations play a significant role in shaping our products and services. Dell listens to its customers and builds solutions that address performance requirements, simplify management, and optimize workloads that scale and for every scale. With the Future Ready IT Survey, we have taken our culture of customer inspired innovation to the next level by taking inputs from customers across the globe in a scientific manner to determine what it is that our customer really requires in the ever changing IT landscape.” said Ravi Pendekanti, Vice President, Server Product Marketing, Dell Inc.

Adding to this Manish Gupta, Director, Enterprise Solutions Group – Dell India said: “Organisations in India have been at the forefront of technology adoption. They understand the need for more efficient, scalable IT infrastructure and the direct co-relation it has to business productivity. The survey has helped us better understand what products and solutions are apt for the Indian customer and how they can be adapted in this direction.”

Mobility and Big Data seen as the most important IT trends in India

The data center today is evolving. Industry forces such as cloud computing, mobility, big data and software-defined are rewriting the rules of IT and in turn are changing the way technology architectures are being developed. IT Decisions Makers in India and globally are realising the importance of these trends and the influence they are having on IT. In India:

66% of ITDMs felt that Mobility is the most important technology trend to their organisation; followed by Big Data (65 %) and Cloud Computing (63 %)
53 % of ITDMs stated that they will be investing in Cloud Computing in the next one year; followed by Mobility (41%)
68 % of Indian organisations have already deployed software defined storage solutions
74% of ITDMs were very concerned ‘Security, Compliance and Data Protection’ issues in their organisation; 59 % were concerned with managing opex

Organisations aspire to hyperscale IT similar to Facebook and Amazon

Businesses are paying greater attention to the flexibility and efficiency companies such as Facebook and Amazon are able to build into their data centers. These data centers are constructed to scale with the demands of specific web front-end applications. Infact, Gartner predicted this ‘hyperscale IT’ as one of the top strategic technology trends for 2014. ITDMS in India were especially interested in ‘hyperscale IT’, well over the global average. In India:

90 % of ITDMs are interested in making IT work like hyperscale types
77 % of ITDMs see operational efficiencies as an important benefit of hyperscale computing
59 % felt that it is a low cost investment
Most Indian companies (62%) felt that management was a barrier to their adoption of hyperscale computing

Data center Management should be remote and less complex

Automation and simplicity in the data center are the key factors driving data center management. The emergence of big technology trends such as Big Data, Mobility, Cloud Computing and Software Defined Enterprise will place greater demands on efficiency from the data center. Across markets IT Decision Makers believe data center management is importance and reducing operational complexity will make data center management simpler. In India:

98 % of ITDMs felt that Data center management is most important out of which 81 % companies stated it as being “very important”
55 % of ITDMs are concerned about their ability to address data center issues quickly.
65 % of ITDMs are able to manage their data centers remotely
75 % ITDMs felt that reducing operational complexity will make data center management simpler

Ability to optimize applications and performance most important to ITDMs

As businesses continue to run more data-intensive applications such as real-time analytics, low-latency, access to data becomes even more critical. IT Decision makers have often been negatively impacted by performance issues while running applications and are prioritizing reductions in operational and complexity and simplification. In India:

Business Processing is seen as the most important workload (63 %) for Indian companies; followed by virtualisation (60%)
80% of ITDMs are running a mixture of traditional business and emerging application types.
74% of ITDMs see improved management as the most important benefit received from integrated systems.
50% of ITDMs felt that Optimizing applications and performance to meet business objectives is most important to them in deciding what workloads or applications to run in your environment.
90 % of ITDMs felt that there is a need for an IT structure that will tailor infrastructure to specific applications and workloads

Converged Infrastructure gaining prominence; increased deployment in India

Improved performance, perceived lower operating expenditures, greater IT optimization, increased automation and simplified sourcing are driving the adoption of Converged Infrastructure in the market. It also eliminates the hassle of managing multiple hardware and software equipment. This has been instrumental in the increased adoption of Converged Infrastructure globally. In India

38 % of ITDMs have stated that 25 – 49 % of their IT infrastructure is converged
66% of ITDMs see their converged infrastructure as a percentage of their overall infrastructure increasing
Application performance (80 %) and Ease of Management (79%) are seen as the most important advantage of converged infrastructure

About the Survey
Dell commissioned Penn Schoen Berland (PSB) to survey 800 IT decision makers from across the globe through online interviews. The survey took place from July 28 to August 9, 2014 with 100 respondents from each of the following countries: US, UK, Germany, Japan, Brazil, India, China and Russia. The survey consisted of a healthy mix of Small Business ITDMs (253), Medium Business ITDMs (265) and Large Enterprise ITDMs (282).