If you are marketing your technology solutions into the data center, 2009 was a tough year. A recent report by Searchdatacenter.com surveyed 920 technology decision makers between June and September of 2009 and focused on the target’s purchase intentions. The results confirm how the market has been reacting to the various financial pressures of the economy with the majority of respondents reporting that their data center budgets were either flat or decreased.
In my opinion, some of the highlights of the report suggest the data center as we know it today may look very different in the near future (3-4 years) as cloud computing options become more feasible. Of course, the health of these data centers are a critical component to marketing technology solutions. So understanding what the tech buyers are thinking may add value to your marketing planning, message development and content relevance.
The IT shops buying server hardware are geared towards enhancing virtualization deployments
For IT shops that are actually spending on new servers, they’re doing so as part of server virtualization deployments. For the past few years, the top three responses to the question “What are the top three drivers for purchasing new servers?” have been: 1) Normal demand for increased capacity, 2) end of lease/life of the servers, and 3) new applications. Last year a few respondents wrote in “Virtualization” as a driver.
This year it has become the No. 1 factor for those buying servers. Nearly half the respondents said they planned to purchase hardware to enhance virtualization deployments.
Blade spending is down
13% plan to reduce blade spending. In both 2008 and this year’s survey, the same percentage of respondents don’t use blades (40%). So the reduction in blade server spending comes from respondents who spent on these servers last year.
According to the report, more IT managers have discovered the hidden cost of blades. “Many computer rooms just don’t have enough cooling for a rack of blades.” “In scale-out versus scale-up [with virtualization], respondents think scaling up [to a larger server] is just a better solution at this time.”
This may be the first sign of change in the data center environment, I am curious to what others may think. See the full article for more info on this tepid blade server spending.
Windows rules the OS landscape
Windows Server 2008 saw a significant increase in general installations – from 23% to 45% – to the No. 2 spot behind Windows Server 2003.
The rest of the lineup stayed the same: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, followed by the Unixes: Solaris, HP-UX and AIX, respectively.
But when we asked about mission-critical workloads, Windows 2003 stayed in the No. 1 position, Windows 2008 dropped back in the pack, and Red Hat Linux jumped to No. 2. The three Unix variants stayed in the middle, but the combined Unix footprint is double the Linux market share on mission-critical applications, and it’s nearly as large as Windows Server 2003.
The survey showed a decline in the number of shops considering or using Linux. In response to the question, “Does your company use or plan to evaluate Linux on servers this year?”, 54% said ‘no’ last year; 60% said ‘no’ this year. Despite tight budgets and a down economy, Linux adoption declined rather than grew. And, in fact, respondents may view Linux adoption as risky in tough times.
More than a quarter (27%) of respondents said they would not dump Windows for Linux, versus 34% this year. The results seem to indicate that the Linux-to-Windows migration is over.
Reducing data center power is a key issue
According to the survey, data center power consumption is getting more important. The percentage of folks who said this was a major concern increased from 48% to 55% this year. While these numbers are unsurprising given the downturn in the economy and high energy costs, what is surprising is that the behavior concerning power consumption has begun to change: There was a major increase in the number of respondents whose business unit actually pays the power bill, from 37% to 53%.
28% of survey respondents don’t know whether their power bill has increased or decreased. For the respondents who are paying attention, a majority see major increases in the power bill for their data centers. 44% have seen an increase, and 19% say the increase is greater than 10%.
30% of respondents have implemented Hot-aisle/cold aisle containment (the practice of sealing hot aisles and cold aisles in a data center) and an additional 15% plan to next year.
Server virtualization spending continues, but at a sober rate
Virtualization budgets shrank only slightly. Last year 56% of respondents planned to increase spending on virtualization, and only 2% planned a decrease. This year 54% still plan to increase spending.
Click here for the complete Data Center Decisions 2009 survey results.
