Why Data Centers Still Dominate Tech Deployments
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Why Data Centers Still Dominate Tech Deployments
Despite increases in cloud investments, the data center still "rules the day." Find out how IT is managing data center outages and power needs. -
Location, Location, Location
In the organizations surveyed, 65% of IT assets are deployed at enterprise-owned data centers, 22% are with colocation or multi-tenant data center providers, and 13% are in the cloud. -
Migration Equation
67% of the data center and IT professionals surveyed said they're seeing previously data center-enabled workloads now going to the cloud. -
Muddled Concept
More than 70% said their company's process for evaluating cloud and colocation providers could use improvement, with 15% describing this process as "incoherent." -
How IT Addresses Data Center Capacity Demands
Server consolidation: 40%, Cloud migration: 33%, Upgrades of physical infrastructure: 33%, New data center construction: 30%, Colocation space investment: 18% -
Game Plan
68% of the data center and IT pros surveyed said their organization has adopted a multisite IT resiliency strategy that incorporates multiple data centers and relies on live IT app failover. -
Living With Downtime
25% said they've experienced a data center outage in the past 12 months. -
Post-Mortem Assessment
90% of the survey respondents said their company conducts root-cause analyses of outages, and 60% measure the cost of downtime. -
Power Play
43% said their organization has either installed or is considering installing on-site primary data center power generation, such as renewable energy or natural gas. -
Gender Inequity
Nearly half of the survey respondents feel that women are underrepresented in the IT and data center workforce, but less than a third said their company has a plan to address this issue. -
Hot Spot
11% said their company has experienced a data center fire.
Despite the growing presence of the cloud, the majority of IT assets are still deployed at enterprise-owned data centers, according to the Uptime Institute's seventh annual "Data Center Industry Survey." The findings reveal that flaws within the cloud provider evaluation process may be contributing to this trend. Many organizations are, in fact, still addressing data and application storage demands with new data center construction, rather than with cloud migrations or colocation space investments. Data center outages still come with the territory, but most tech departments are getting to the bottom of downtime by conducting root-cause analyses of incidents, as well as measuring their impact on costs. "Increased performance at the processor level, further expansion of server virtualization and the adoption of cloud computing have all created an IT foundation that differs greatly from those seen just five years ago," said Matt Stansberry, senior director of content and publications at Uptime Institute. "Through this change, enterprise-owned data centers have remained a central component. We urge data center and IT professionals to focus on the business aspects of running their IT foundation, creating sets of repeatable processes to make it work efficiently, and adopting new technologies and solutions when the business demands it." Additional findings address a range of data center and IT-related topics, such as power generation methods and the under-representation of women in the workforce, and we've included some of those here. More than 1,000 global data center and IT professionals took part in the research.