MUMBAI, INDIA: Mid-sized enterprises are more likely to adopt cutting-edge technologies such as cloud computing, de-duplication, replication, storage virtualization, and continuous data protection than small or large enterprises to reduce IT costs and manage increasing complexity, according to Symantec Corp.'s latest India findings of its 2010 State of the Data Center study. 

Now in its third year, the study found that mid-sized enterprise data centers show more activity, with more IT managers predicting major changes to the data center and new applications in 2010. They also place a higher importance on staffing and training than their small or large enterprise counterparts.

“Although mid-sized enterprises tend to evaluate and adopt new technologies at a faster rate than larger organizations, they still face similar data center complexities that are compounded by adopting new initiatives,” said Anand Naik, director, systems engineering, Symantec.

He added, “Standardizing on cross-platform solutions that can manage new technologies and automate processes will drive immediate cost reduction and make their jobs easier in the long run.”

Top data center concerns for these enterprises include increased complexity and too many applications.  Most enterprises have 10 or more data center initiatives rated as somewhat or absolutely important and fifty per cent expect significant changes to their data centers in 2010. 

Half of all the enterprises say applications are growing somewhat/quickly and half of them are finding it difficult and costly to meet service level agreements (SLAs). 

One-third of all enterprises say staff productivity is hampered by too many applications.  Adding to the complexity is the continued increase in data causing fifty two per cent of organizations to consider data reduction technologies such as de-duplication.

Controlling storage growth is also one of the major data center objectives for Indian mid- sized enterprises for 2010. Security, backup and recovery, and continuous data protection are the most important initiatives in 2010, ahead of virtualization.  There continues to be room for improvement in disaster recovery (DR). Almost one-third of enterprises haven’t re-evaluated their disaster recovery plan in the last 12 months.  But at the same time sixty- five percent of companies seemed confident on their organization's DR plan unlike last year.

Recommendations

Symantec study suggests that Organizations should deploy de-duplication closer to the information source to eliminate redundant data and reduce storage and network costs.

Data center administrators need to manage storage across heterogeneous server and storage environments in a way that enables them to stop buying storage by leveraging new technology adoption such as storage resource management, thin provisioning, de-duplication, storage virtualization and continuous data protection and recovery. Organizations leveraging a holistic approach to storage management can control storage budget growth and often postpone storage purchases.

Disaster recovery testing is invaluable, but can significantly impact business. Enterprises should seek to improve the success of testing by evaluating and implementing testing methods which are non-disruptive. Organizations should deploy a single, unified platform for physical and virtual machine protection to simplify information management.