InformationWeek 2014 State
of the Data Center Survey
Research Findings
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Executive Summary
The data center is full of nonstop action. In the physical infrastructure, SDN is disrupting networking, flash is shaking up
storage, and hypervisors have revolutionized how we buy servers. For managers, DevOps and Lean business models
are changing attitudes and application strategies. And of course, cloud is everywhere.
All 217 respondents to our new State of the Data Center Survey are involved with data center management or decisionmaking at organizations with data centers of 1,000 square feet or larger. Among them:
>> 73% see demand for data center resources increasing over the previous year.
>> 41% expect to have 75% or more of their organizations' production servers virtualized by the end of 2015.
>> 37% say storage growth will have the greatest impact on data center operations in the coming 12 months.
>> 34% call private cloud a high priority and say their companies are there or well along the way; that’s up from 27% in
our 2013 survey.
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Size: At least 1,000 square feet
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Virtualization reigns
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New facilities a low priority
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Standardization drives hardware purchases
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Software standardization grows, too
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Application goals: reliability, security
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IT, biz needs usually jibe
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SDN not widespread
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Data warehousing losing popularity?
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Convenience top reason for choosing appliances
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Appliances increasingly used for analytics
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Vmware vCenter most popular stack
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Mainframe use dying off
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Just 21% plan to increase mainframe use
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Data center is about a quarter of total budget
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2014: Maintenance expenditures twice that of innovation
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2015: Maintenance will still devour budget
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Data center resources needs increase
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Top disrupters: 10 Gbps networks, storage growth
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Server virtualization growing
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Disaster recovery still #1 reason to virtualize
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Best measure of virtualization success? Money saved
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Cooling a concern for most
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Most systems are in house
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Private clouds: not a high priority for most
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Apps stay on dedicated systems, out of the cloud
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Respondent job titles
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Organization’s annual revenue
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Respondents mostly in education, government
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Respondent companies mostly large
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Research Synopsis
Survey Name InformationWeek 2014 State of the Data Center Survey
Survey Date
June 2014
Region North America
Number of Respondents
217
urpose To comprehensively assess the current state of data centers; understand data center resource constraints;
P
and review efforts to monitor, manage, and measure IT and data center systems.
Methodology InformationWeek surveyed business technology decision-makers at North American companies with
data centers of 1,000 square feet or larger. The survey was conducted online, and respondents were recruited via an
email invitation containing an embedded link to the survey. The email invitation was sent to qualified InformationWeek
subscribers.
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