Over a quarter of those polled (26%) say their company is showing little or no activity in making their IT infrastructure ‘greener’.
This compares to 16% who are ‘very actively’ and 14% who are ‘actively’ pursuing environmental measures. The bulk, 40%, are just seen as ‘moderately active’ in this area.
Organisations are hitting problems with their physical data centre environment as they try to re-engineer their IT infrastructure. The key constraints are lack of available space for new infrastructure, cited by 44% of respondents, coupled with a shortage of power capacity, mentioned by 38%. In some cases (16%) this is preventing the latest high-density computing technology being deployed.
The need to reduce heating and cooling requirements is also an issue for 40% of respondents, while 22% mention the high cost of real estate as being a limiting factor.
The return to a more centralised IT environment is gaining momentum, with 34% of companies already having a fully centralised IT environment, a further 48% moving in this direction and another 8% planning to do so. The key drivers are to save costs, improve efficiency and provide a more secure environment.
This trend towards centralisation goes hand-in-hand with reducing processing power on the desktop and consolidating application delivery from within the data centre. From the sample, 12% of companies have already cut desktop processing power, with a further 14% planning to do so and 26% evaluating the option.
One of the drivers for this is ‘thin-client’ technology, which has been steadily gaining popularity as applications can be managed more cost-effectively and securely from a central location. Only a few companies, 4%, have so far implemented it across the whole organisation but half are using it in some parts of the business. A further 8% plan to deploy ‘thin-client’ with another 8% evaluating its use.
Demonstrating the need to trim costs and simplify the IT infrastructure, 82%, of companies are currently consolidating the number of servers they use. This is an ongoing process with no-one saying they have completed this operation. Only 18% of organisations are not engaged in any form of server rationalisation.
Virtualisation technology is providing much of the impetus for this trend, as companies can now easily consolidate multiple applications onto a single large server, rather than have them spread across several smaller ones. Its adoption is growing dramatically and shows no sign of slackening. Of the companies interviewed 38% are currently using this technology, 20% plan to and a further 24% are evaluating its use. Only 4% have no plans to move in this direction.