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Data Centers: Choking on Data
Data centers, by definition, are designed to manage data, so it seems a bit odd that Gartner cites too much data as the number one challenge that data centers must come to grips with. Enterprise data is currently growing at a rate of 40 to 60 percent each year. Gartner’s survey found that rapid growth of the data managed in data centers is one of the top three challenges of enterprises. The other two challenges are performance/scalability, and data congestion/connectivity.
The problem of rapid data growth has been exacerbated over the last two years by a poor economy and reduced budgets. Respondents to the survey thought that it might take some time before data center budgets would ever fully bounce back to their previous level. But even with restricted budgets, as many as 62 percent say that they plan to expand their data storage capacities before the end of 2011, and 30 percent are even going as far as to plan to build new data centers to keep pace with their data growth.
Naveen Mishra, principle Research analyst at Gartner, said that “as the global economy begins to revive in 2010 and organizations start to shift focus to a return to growth, IT organizations will be challenged to support the various growth initiatives.” Along those same lines, April Adams, researcher at Gartner, said that “while all the top data center hardware infrastructure challenges impact cost to some degree, data growth is particularly associated with increased costs relative to hardware, software, associated maintenance, administration and services.”
Part of the problem is that even when data retention policies exist, data isn’t being appropriately deleted. The current copy of a document may be deleted, but often overlooked and not deleted, are copies of that same file in mirrored systems and backups. 62 percent of those surveyed said that they are currently investing in data retirement project that aim to try to purge systems of unneeded data.
