Chinese companies focused on improving performance

Chinese data centre managers have a lot on their agenda this year as apparent from the findings of Symantec's 2010 State of the Data Center study.

This year, these professionals have decided to focus on several issues such as improving service levels, increasing availability and improving responsiveness of their data centres, while reducing costs.

Reduction of costs

Operating in limited budgets can be a challenge for many and about 85 per cent of the respondents said reducing costs is a primary objective for data centre managers. Despite this constraint, they want to focus on security, backup and recovery and continuous data protection.

Data centre managers want to keep their customers happy and want to take relevant steps to improve the performance of their facilities to meet this goal. Symantec's study shows that it is very important for Chinese enterprises to improve service levels (46 per cent), increase availability (45 per cent) and improve responsiveness (47 per cent).

Bernard Kwok, Symantec's senior vice president for Asia Pacific and Japan, noted that although economy is looking up, companies want to be cautious and working towards reducing costs without reducing the quality of service.

Adopting new technologies

The goals for 2010 have been set and according to Bernard Kwok, Symantec's senior vice president for Asia Pacific and Japan, they can be achieved by optimising the data centre by utilising new technologies. He said optimisation will not only offer immediate value and return on investment but will also deliver cost savings.

The information to prepare this study was collected by surveying 1,780 data centre managers in 26 countries in November 2009. Results show that the mid-sized enterprises are ahead of small or large enterprises in terms of initiatives taken and most organisations are concerned about increased complexity and too many applications. Half of the enterprises said they are somewhat/extremely under-staffed and there is plenty of room for improvement in disaster recovery.

Symantec suggests that mid-sized enterprises should deploy software that supports heterogeneous environments and companies should deploy deduplication closer to the information source to eliminate redundant data and reduce storage and network costs.

Companies should also focus on disaster recovery testing and deploy a single, unified platform for physical and virtual machine protection to simplify information management, adds Symantec.