Monday, 24 November 2008

The Complexities Surrounding Data Center Transformation

With IT widely recognized as an important enabler of business growth, there has been an increased focus among Asia/Pacific customers to transform their datacenters to better support...

With IT widely recognized as an important enabler of business growth, there has been an increased focus among Asia/Pacific customers to transform their datacenters to better support the rapidly changing business needs.

According to results from IDC's Asia/Pacific "Continuum" End User Survey 2008 conducted in Asia/Pacific, the top three challenges that businesses face today are successfully expanding into new business opportunities, controlling cost of businesses, and improving customer satisfaction by providing better experiences.

Avneesh Saxena, Group Vice President, Asia/Pacific Systems, Storage and Software Research, said that transformation is the need of the day. We are not talking about replacing any one IT product, but rather rejuvenating the entire data center that drives IT within an organization. As significant amounts of time, money and effort go into building a new data center, it is important for end users to be clear about how to plan, build, and manage their data centers efficiently.

IDC classifies data centers today into three primary categories based on the type of business it serves. Web 2.0 data centers are leading the transformation by setting new standards in data center design and architecture. Avneesh adds, these companies are fairly new and hence starting from scratch in the kind of IT that will support their business model. Hosted/managed and traditional data centers are the ones that need to transform, in order to stay competitive and meet the new business objectives.

Most end-users realize the need to transform their data centers but are at a loss on where to start and who they should partner with. There is also confusion around the ideal type of datacenter that will serve their needs in the future.