What Drives Data Center Complexity Part 1

Studies reveal that business apps drive data center complexities more than anything else.

Data centers are complex, and complexity can cause problems. But many companies rush to virtualization and other simplification strategies to reduce data center complexities without seeing the primary driver of complexity in data center.

According to a recent report published by Symantec, the key driver of data center complexity is business critical applications. The report that was prepared after a detailed study focused on 2453 IT professionals from around 32 countries in the world. Nearly 65 percent of the respondents cited the business centric applications as the primary drive of the ever increasing complexity of data centers.

Every app creates so much footprint that every time it is replicated via virtualization, the complexity scales up further. Data storage requirements go up with every new business application in the operational environment. Storage costs associated with business centric applications an be very high with when you calculate license costs and costs of virtualization.

Mobile computing was cited by nearly 45 percent of the surveyed folks as the next big driver of complexity. Server virtualization and the public cloud are not that behind with 43 and 41 per cent of the respondents citing them respectively in the survey report.

According to the survey, the biggest downside of increased complexity is increased costs, cited by 47 percent of the respondents. Increased lead time for storage migration was next at 39 percent, provisioning of storage at 38 percent and finally downtime and security breaches occupy equal share at 35 percent.

Complexity is driven by multiple variables, and the costs of complexity can be high. How are you addressing complexity in your data center?

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.